[Ford Madox Hueffer in original]

(London: John Lane, 1915)

I

THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard.
We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of
the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy--or,
rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy
and yet as close as a good glove's with your hand.
My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as
well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet,
in another sense, we knew nothing at all about
them. This is, I believe, a state of things only
possible with English people of whom, till today,
when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this
sad affair, I knew nothing whatever. Six months
ago I had never been to England, and, certainly, I
had never sounded the depths of an English heart.
I had known the shallows.

I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted
with many English people. Living, as we perforce
lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were,
leisured Americans, which is as much as to say
that we were un-American, we were thrown very much
into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you
see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and
Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us,
and Nauheim always received us from July to
September. You will gather from this statement
that one of us had, as the saying is, a
"heart", and, from the statement that my
wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But,
whereas a yearly month or so at Nauheim tuned him
up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the
twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just
enough to keep poor Florence alive from year to
year. The reason for his heart was,
approximately, polo, or too much hard
sportsmanship in his youth.
The reason for poor Florence's broken years was
a storm at sea upon our first crossing to Europe,
and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment in
that continent were doctor's orders. They said
that even the short Channel crossing might well
kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home
on sick leave from an India to which he was never
to return, was thirty-three; Mrs
Ashburnham--Leonora--was thirty-one. I was
thirty-six and poor Florence thirty. Thus today
Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain
Ashburnham forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and
Leonora forty. You will perceive, therefore, that
our friendship has been a young-middle-aged
affair, since we were all of us of quite quiet
dispositions, the Ashburnhams being more
particularly what in England it is the custom to
call "quite good people".

They were descended, as you will probably
expect, from the Ashburnham who accompanied
Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also
expect with this class of English people, you
would never have noticed it. Mrs Ashburnham was a
Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford,
Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more
old-fashioned than even the inhabitants of
Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a
Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is
historically true, there are more old English
families than you would find in any six English
counties taken together. I carry about with me,
indeed--as if it were the only thing that
invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the
globe--the title deeds of my farm, which once
covered several blocks between Chestnut and Walnut
Streets. These title deeds are of wampum, the
grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who
left Farnham in Surrey in company with William
Penn. Florence's people, as is so often the case
with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the
neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the
Ashburnhams' place is. From there, at this
moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my
reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in
human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city
or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to
set down what they have witnessed for the benefit
of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely
remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight
out of their heads.

Some one has said that the death of a mouse
from cancer is the whole sack of Rome by the
Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up of
our little four-square coterie was such another
unthinkable event. Supposing that you should come
upon us sitting together at one of the little
tables in front of the club house, let us say, at
Homburg, taking tea of an afternoon and watching
the miniature golf, you would have said that, as
human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe
castle. We were, if you will, one of those tall
ships with the white sails upon a blue sea, one of
those things that seem the proudest and the safest
of all the beautiful and safe things that God has
permitted the mind of men to frame. Where better
could one take refuge? Where better?

Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's
gone. I can't believe that that long, tranquil
life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished
in four crashing days at the end of nine years and
six weeks. Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was
like a minuet, simply because on every possible
occasion and in every possible circumstance we
knew where to go, where to sit, which table we
unanimously should choose; and we could rise and
go, all four together, without a signal from any
one of us, always to the music of the Kur
orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or,
if it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed,
it can't be gone. You can't kill a minuet de la
cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the
harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats
may destroy the white satin favours. The mob may
sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but surely
the minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself
away into the furthest stars, even as our minuet
of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping
itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old
beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong
themselves? Isn't there any Nirvana pervaded by
the faint thrilling of instruments that have
fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had
frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet
that we stepped; it was a prison--a prison full of
screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might
not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as
we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus
Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my
creator that it was true. It was true sunshine;
the true music; the true splash of the fountains
from the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me
we were four people with the same tastes, with the
same desires, acting--or, no, not acting--sitting
here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth?
If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple
that is rotten at the core and discover its
rottenness only in nine years and six months less
four days, isn't it true to say that for nine
years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may well
be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife
and with poor dear Florence. And, if you come to
think of it, isn't it a little odd that the
physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our
four-square house never presented itself to my
mind as a menace to its security? It doesn't so
present itself now though the two of them are
actually dead. I don't know. . . .

I know nothing--nothing in the world--of the
hearts of men. I only know that I am
alone--horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever
again witness, for me, friendly intercourse. No
smoking-room will ever be other than peopled with
incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet,
in the name of God, what should I know if I don't
know the life of the hearth and of the
smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed
in those places? The warm hearthside! --Well,
there was Florence: I believe that for the twelve
years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed
irretrievably to have weakened her heart--I don't
believe that for one minute she was out of my
sight, except when she was safely tucked up in bed
and I should be downstairs, talking to some good
fellow or other in some lounge or smoking-room or
taking my final turn with a cigar before going to
bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence.
But how can she have known what she knew? How
could she have got to know it? To know it so
fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been
the actual time. It must have been when I was
taking my baths, and my Swedish exercises, being
manicured. Leading the life I did, of the
sedulous, strained nurse, I had to do something to
keep myself fit. It must have been then! Yet
even that can't have been enough time to get the
tremendously long conversations full of worldly
wisdom that Leonora has reported to me since their
deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during
our prescribed walks in Nauheim and the
neighbourhood she found time to carry on the
protracted negotiations which she did carry on
between Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't
it incredible that during all that time Edward and
Leonora never spoke a word to each other in
private? What is one to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model
couple. He was as devoted as it was possible to
be without appearing fatuous. So well set up,
with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of
stupidity, such a warm goodheartedness! And
she--so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair!
Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so
extraordinarily the real thing that she seemed too
good to be true. You don't, I mean, as a rule,
get it all so superlatively together. To be the
county family, to look the county family, to be so
appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be so
perfect in manner--even just to the saving touch
of insolence that seems to be necessary. To have
all that and to be all that! No, it was too good
to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking
over the whole matter she said to me: "Once I
tried to have a lover but I was so sick at the
heart, so utterly worn out that I had to send him
away." That struck me as the most amazing
thing I had ever heard. She said "I was
actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such
a dear fellow! And I was saying to myself,
fiercely, hissing it between my teeth, as they say
in novels--and really clenching them together: I
was saying to myself: 'Now, I'm in for it and I'll
really have a good time for once in my life--for
once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a
carriage, coming back from a hunt ball. Eleven
miles we had to drive! And then suddenly the
bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless
acting--it fell on me like a blight, it spoilt
everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had been
spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I
burst out crying and I cried and I cried for the
whole eleven miles. Just imagine me
crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the
poor dear chap like that. It certainly wasn't
playing the game, was it now?"

I don't know; I don't know; was that last
remark of hers the remark of a harlot, or is it
what every decent woman, county family or not
county family, thinks at the bottom of her heart?
Or thinks all the time for the matter of that?
Who knows?

Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and
day, at this pitch of civilization to which we
have attained, after all the preachings of all the
moralists, and all the teachings of all the
mothers to all the daughters in saecula
saeculorum
. . . but perhaps that is what all mothers teach
all daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or
with heart whispering to heart. And, if one
doesn't know as much as that about the first thing
in the world, what does one know and why is one
here?

I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told
Florence that and what Florence had said and she
answered:--"Florence didn't offer any comment
at all. What could she say? There wasn't
anything to be said. With the grinding poverty we
had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the
way the poverty came about--you know what
I mean--any woman would have been justified in
taking a lover and presents too. Florence once
said about a very similar position--she was a
little too well-bred, too American, to talk about
mine--that it was a case of perfectly open riding
and the woman could just act on the spur of the
moment. She said it in American of course, but
that was the sense of it. I think her actual
words were: 'That it was up to her to take it or
leave it. . . .'"

I don't want you to think that I am writing
Teddy Ashburnham down a brute. I don't believe he
was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that.
For as I've said what do I know even of the
smoking-room? Fellows come in and tell the most
extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that they
will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd
be offended if you suggested that they weren't the
sort of person you could trust your wife alone
with. And very likely they'd be quite properly
offended--that is if you can trust anybody alone
with anybody. But that sort of fellow obviously
takes more delight in listening to or in telling
gross stories--more delight than in anything else
in the world. They'll hunt languidly and dress
languidly and dine languidly and work without
enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three
minutes' conversation about anything whatever and
yet, when the other sort of conversation begins,
they'll laugh. and wake up and throw themselves
about in their chairs. Then, if they so delight
in the narration, how is it possible that they can
be offended--and properly offended--at the
suggestion that they might make attempts upon your
wife's honour? Or again: Edward Ashburnham was
the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent
magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best
landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England.
To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I myself
have witnessed, he was like a painstaking
guardian. And he never told a story that couldn't
have gone into the columns of the
Field more than once or twice in all
the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't even
like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and
go out to buy a cigar or something of that sort.
You would have said that he was just exactly the
sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife
with. And I trusted mine and it was madness.

And yet again you have me. If poor Edward was
dangerous because of the chastity of his
expressions--and they say that is always the
hall-mark of a libertine--what about myself? For
I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much
as hinted at an impropriety in my conversation in
the whole of my days; and more than that, I will
vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the
absolute chastity of my life. At what, then, does
it all work out? Is the whole thing a folly and a
mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the
proper man--the man with the right to existence--a
raging stallion forever neighing after his
neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide
us. And if everything is so nebulous about a
matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what is
there to guide us in the more subtle morality of
all other personal contacts, associations, and
activities? Or are we meant to act on impulse
alone? It is all a darkness.

II

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing
down--whether it would be better to try and tell
the story from the beginning, as if it were a
story; or whether to tell it from this distance of
time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or
from those of Edward himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight
or so at one side of the fireplace of a country
cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me. And
I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the
sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great
black flood of wind polishes the bright stars.
From time to time we shall get up and go to the
door and look out at the great moon and say:
"Why, it is nearly as bright as in
Provence!" And then we shall come back to the
fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we
are not in that Provence where even the saddest
stories are gay. Consider the lamentable history
of Peire Vidal. Two years ago Florence and I
motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in
the Black Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous
valley there rises up an immense pinnacle and on
the pinnacle are four castles--Las Tours, the
Towers. And the immense mistral blew down that
valley which was the way from France into Provence
so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like
hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary
crept into the iron rocks that they might not be
torn up by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who
wanted to go to Las Tours. You are to imagine
that, however much her bright personality came
from Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate
of Poughkeepsie. I never could imagine how she
did it--the queer, chattery person that she was.
With the far-away look in her eyes--which wasn't,
however, in the least romantic--I mean that she
didn't look as if she were seeing poetic dreams,
or looking through you, for she hardly ever did
look at you!--holding up one hand as if she wished
to silence any objection--or any comment for the
matter of that--she would talk. She would talk
about William the Silent, about Gustave the
Loquacious, about Paris frocks, about how the poor
dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranée train-deluxe,
about whether it would be worth while to get off
at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another
look at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of
course--beautiful Beaucaire, with the high,
triangular white tower, that looked as thin as a
needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth
and Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey walls on the
top of the pinnacle surrounding an acre and a half
of blue irises, beneath the tallness of the stone
pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine is!
. . .

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to
Heidelberg, not to Hamelin, not to Verona, not to
Mont Majour--not so much as to Carcassonne itself.
We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence
got all she wanted out of one look at a place.
She had the seeing eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is
full of places to which I want to return--towns
with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines
against the blue of the sky; corners of gables,
all carved and painted with stags and scarlet
flowers and crowstepped gables with the little
saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and
walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on
the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.
Not one of them did we see more than once, so that
the whole world for me is like spots of colour in
an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't so I
should have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression?
Again I don't know. You, the listener, sit
opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't
tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to
get you to see what sort of life it was I led with
Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she
was bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance
over the floors of castles and over seas and over
and over and over the salons of modistes and over
the plages of the Riviera--like a gay
tremulous beam, reflected from water upon a
ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that
bright thing in existence. And it was almost as
difficult as trying to catch with your hand that
dancing reflection. And the task lasted for
years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the
laziest man in Philadelphia. They had never been
to Philadelphia and they had the New England
conscience. You see, the first thing they said to
me when I called in on Florence in the little
ancient, colonial, wooden house beneath the high,
thin-leaved elms--the first question they asked me
was not how I did but what did I do. And I did
nothing. I suppose I ought to have done
something, but I didn't see any call to do it.
Why does one do things? I just drifted in and
wanted Florence. First I had drifted in on
Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the
sort in Fourteenth Street, which was then still
residential. I don't know why I had gone to New
York; I don't know why I had gone to the tea. I
don't see why Florence should have gone to that
sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the place at
which, even then, you expected to find a
Poughkeepsie graduate. I guess Florence wanted to
raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and did
it as she might have gone in slumming.
Intellectual slumming, that was what it was. She
always wanted to leave the world a little more
elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I
have heard her lecture Teddy Ashburnham by the
hour on the difference between a Franz Hals and a
Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean statues were
cubical with knobs on the top. I wonder what he
made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole
attentions, my whole endeavours were to keep poor
dear Florence on to topics like the finds at
Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter
Pater. I had to keep her at it, you understand,
or she might die. For I was solemnly informed
that if she became excited over anything or if her
emotions were really stirred her little heart
might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to
watch every word that any person uttered in any
conversation and I had to head it off what the
English call "things"--off love,
poverty, crime, religion and the rest of it. Yes,
the first doctor that we had when she was carried
off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be
done. Good God, are all these fellows monstrous
idiots, or is there a freemasonry between all of
them from end to end of the earth? . . . That
is what makes me think of that fellow Peire
Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture and I
had to head her towards culture and at the same
time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh,
and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think
of love. Do you know the story? Las Tours of the
Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche
Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of
commendation, La Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire
Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to La Louve.
And she wouldn't have anything to do with him.
So, out of compliment to her--the things people do
when they're in love!--he dressed himself up in
wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains.
And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their
dogs mistook him for a wolf and he was torn with
the fangs and beaten with clubs. So they carried
him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all
impressed. They polished him up and her husband
remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal was, you
see, a great poet and it was not proper to treat a
great poet with indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of
Jerusalem or somewhere and the husband had to
kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve
wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat
with four companions to redeem the Holy Sepulchre.
And they struck on a rock somewhere, and, at great
expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition
to fetch him back. And Peire Vidal fell all over
the Lady's bed while the husband, who was a most
ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about
the courtesy that is due to great poets. But I
suppose La Louve was the more ferocious of the
two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't
that a story?

You haven't an idea of the queer
old-fashionedness of Florence's aunts--the Misses
Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An
extraordinarily lovable man, that Uncle John.
Thin, gentle, and with a "heart" that
made his life very much what Florence's afterwards
became. He didn't reside at Stamford; his home
was in Waterbury where the watches come from. He
had a factory there which, in our queer American
way, would change its functions almost from year
to year. For nine months or so it would
manufacture buttons out of bone. Then it would
suddenly produce brass buttons for coachmen's
liveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed
tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the
poor old gentleman, with his weak and fluttering
heart, didn't want his factory to manufacture
anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did
retire when he was seventy. But he was so worried
at having all the street boys in the town point
after him and exclaim: "There goes the
laziest man in Waterbury!" that he tried
taking a tour round the world. And Florence and a
young man called Jimmy went with him. It appears
from what Florence told me that Jimmy's function
with Mr Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for
him. He had to keep him, for instance, out of
political discussions. For the poor old man was a
violent Democrat in days when you might travel the
world over without finding anything but a
Republican. Anyhow, they went round the
world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to
give you an idea of what the old gentleman was
like. For it is perhaps important that you should
know what the old gentleman was; he had a great
deal of influence in forming the character of my
poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for
the South Seas old Mr Hurlbird said he must take
something with him to make little presents to
people he met on the voyage. And it struck him
that the things to take for that purpose were
oranges--because California is the orange
country--and comfortable folding chairs. So he
bought I don't know how many cases of oranges--the
great cool California oranges, and half-a-dozen
folding chairs in a special case that he always
kept in his cabin. There must have been half a
cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several
steamers that they employed--to every person with
whom he had so much as a nodding acquaintance, he
gave an orange every morning. And they lasted him
right round the girdle of this mighty globe of
ours. When they were at North Cape, even, he saw
on the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a
lighthouse. "Hello," says he to
himself, "these fellows must be very lonely.
Let's take them some oranges." So he had a
boatload of his fruit out and had himself rowed to
the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding chairs
he lent to any lady that he came across and liked
or who seemed tired and invalidish on the ship.
And so, guarded against his heart and, having his
niece with him, he went round the world. . .
.

He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You
wouldn't have known he had one. He only left it
to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the
benefit of science, since he considered it to be
quite an extraordinary kind of heart. And the
joke of the matter was that, when, at the age of
eighty-four, just five days before poor Florence,
he died of bronchitis there was found to be
absolutely nothing the matter with that organ. It
had certainly jumped or squeaked or something just
sufficiently to take in the doctors, hut it
appears that that was because of an odd formation
of the lungs. I don't much understand about these
matters.

I inherited his money because Florence died
five days after him. I wish I hadn't. It was a
great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury just
after Florence's death because the poor dear old
fellow had left a good many charitable bequests
and I had to appoint trustees. I didn't like the
idea of their not being properly handled.

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had
got things roughly settled I received the
extraordinary cable from Ashburnham begging me to
come back and have a talk with him. And
immediately afterwards came one from Leonora
saying, "Yes, please do come. You could be
so helpful." It was as if he had sent the
cable without consulting her and had afterwards
told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had
happened, except that he had told the girl and the
girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too late
to be of any good if I could have been of any
good. And then I had my first taste of English
life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I
never shall forget the polished cob that Edward,
beside me, drove; the animal's action, its
high-stepping, its skin that was like satin. And
the peace! And the red cheeks! And the
beautiful, beautiful old house.

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we
descended on it from the high, clear, windswept
waste of the New Forest. I tell you it was
amazing to arrive there from Waterbury. And it
came into my head--for Teddy Ashburnham, you
remember, had cabled to me to "come and have
a talk" with him--that it was unbelievable
that anything essentially calamitous could happen
to that place and those people. I tell you it was
the very spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful
and smiling, with her coils of yellow hair, stood
on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and
a maid or so behind her. And she just said:
"So glad you've come," as if I'd run
down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead
of having come half the world over at the call of
two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think.

And that poor devil beside me was in an agony.
Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the
mind of man to imagine.

III

IT was a very hot summer, in August, 1904; and
Florence had already been taking the baths for a
month. I don't know how it feels to be a patient
at one of those places. I never was a patient
anywhere. I daresay the patients get a home
feeling and some sort of anchorage in the spot.
They seem to like the bath attendants, with their
cheerful faces, their air of authority, their
white linen. But, for myself, to be at Nauheim
gave me a sense--what shall I say?--a sense almost
of nakedness--the nakedness that one feels on the
sea-shore or in any great open space. I had no
attachments, no accumulations. In one's own home
it is as if little, innate sympathies draw one to
particular chairs that seem to enfold one in an
embrace, or take one along particular streets that
seem friendly when others may be hostile. And,
believe me, that feeling is a very important part
of life. I know it well, that have been for so
long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts.
And one is too polished up. Heaven knows I was
never an untidy man. But the feeling that I had
when, whilst poor Florence was taking her morning
bath, I stood upon the carefully swept steps of
the Englischer Hof, looking at the carefully
arranged trees in tubs upon the carefully arranged
gravel whilst carefully arranged people walked
past in carefully calculated gaiety, at the
carefully calculated hour, the tall trees of the
public gardens, going up to the right; the reddish
stone of the baths--or were they white half-timber
châlets? Upon my word I have forgotten, I
who was there so often. That will give you the
measure of how much I was in the landscape. I
could find my way blindfolded to the hot rooms, to
the douche rooms, to the fountain in the centre of
the quadrangle where the rusty water gushes out.
Yes, I could find my way blindfolded. I know the
exact distances. From the Hotel Regina you took
one hundred and eighty-seven paces, then, turning
sharp, left-handed, four hundred and twenty took
you straight down to the fountain. From the
Englischer Hof, starting on the sidewalk, it was
ninety-seven paces and the same four hundred and
twenty, but turning lefthanded this time.

And now you understand that, having nothing in
the world to do--but nothing whatever! I fell
into the habit of counting my footsteps. I would
walk with Florence to the baths. And, of course,
she entertained me with her conversation. It was,
as I have said, wonderful what she could make
conversation out of. She walked very lightly, and
her hair was very nicely done, and she dressed
beautifully and very expensively. Of course she
had money of her own, but I shouldn't have minded.
And yet you know I can't remember a single one of
her dresses. Or I can remember just one, a very
simple one of blue figured silk--a Chinese
pattern--very full in the skirts and broadening
out over the shoulders. And her hair was
copper-coloured, and the heels of her shoes were
exceedingly high, so that she tripped upon the
points of her toes. And when she came to the door
of the bathing place, and when it opened to
receive her, she would look back at me with a
little coquettish smile, so that her cheek
appeared to be caressing her shoulder.

I seem to remember that, with that dress, she
wore an immensely broad Leghorn hat--like the
Chapeau de Paille of Rubens, only very white. The
hat would be tied with a lightly knotted scarf of
the same stuff as her dress. She knew how to give
value to her blue eyes. And round her neck would
be some simple pink, coral beads. And her
complexion had a perfect clearness, a perfect
smoothness . . .

Yes, that is how I most exactly remember her,
in that dress, in that hat, looking over her
shoulder at me so that the eyes flashed very
blue--dark pebble blue . . .

And, what the devil! For whose benefit did she
do it? For that of the bath attendant? of the
passers-by? I don't know. Anyhow, it can't have
been for me, for never, in all the years of her
life, never on any possible occasion, or in any
other place did she so smile to me, mockingly,
invitingly. Ah, she was a riddle; but then, all
other women are riddles. And it occurs to me that
some way back I began a sentence that I have never
finished . . . It was about the feeling that I
had when I stood on the steps of my hotel every
morning before starting out to fetch Florence back
from the bath. Natty, precise, well-brushed,
conscious of being rather small amongst the long
English, the lank Americans, the rotund Germans,
and the obese Russian Jewesses, I should stand
there, tapping a cigarette on the outside of my
case, surveying for a moment the world in the
sunlight. But a day was to come when I was never
to do it again alone. You can imagine, therefore,
what the coming of the Ashburnhams meant to me.

I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but
I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room
of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening--and on so
many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished
from my memory, whole cities that I have never
visited again, but that white room, festooned with
papier-maché fruits and flowers; the tall
windows; the many tables; the black screen round
the door with three golden cranes flying upward on
each panel; the palm-tree in the centre of the
room; the swish of the waiter's feet; the cold
expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they
came in every evening--their air of earnestness as
if they must go through a meal prescribed by the
Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if
they must seek not by any means to enjoy their
meals--those things I shall not easily forget.
And then, one evening, in the twilight, I saw
Edward Ashburnham lounge round the screen into the
room. The head waiter, a man with a face all
grey--in what subterranean nooks or corners do
people cultivate those absolutely grey
complexions?--went with the timorous patronage of
these creatures towards him and held out a grey
ear to be whispered into. It was generally a
disagreeable ordeal for newcomers but Edward
Ashburnham bore it like an Englishman and a
gentleman. I could see his lips form a word of
three syllables--remember I had nothing in the
world to do but to notice these niceties--and
immediately I knew that he must be Edward
Ashburnham, Captain, Fourteenth Hussars, of
Branshaw House, Branshaw Teleragh. I knew it
because every evening just before dinner, whilst I
waited in the hall, I used, by the courtesy of
Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor, to inspect the
little police reports that each guest was expected
to sign upon taking a room.

The head waiter piloted him immediately to a
vacant table, three away from my own--the table
that the Grenfalls of Falls River, N.J., had just
vacated. It struck me that that was not a very
nice table for the newcomers, since the sunlight,
low though it was, shone straight down upon it,
and the same idea seemed to come at the same
moment into Captain Ashburnham's head. His face
hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion,
expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was
in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor
fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed
to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might
have been walking in a jungle. I never came
across such a perfect expression before and I
never shall again. It was insolence and not
insolence; it was modesty and not modesty. His
hair was fair, extraordinarily ordered in a wave,
running from the left temple to the right; his
face was a light brick-red, perfectly uniform in
tint up to the roots of the hair itself; his
yellow moustache was as stiff as a toothbrush and
I verily believe that he had his black smoking
jacket thickened a little over the shoulder-blades
so as to give himself the air of the slightest
possible stoop. It would be like him to do that;
that was the sort of thing he thought about.
Martingales, Chiffney bits, boots; where you got
the best soap, the best brandy, the name of the
chap who rode a plater down the Khyber cliffs; the
spreading power of number three shot before a
charge of number four powder . . . by heavens,
I hardly ever heard him talk of anything else.
Not in all the years that I knew him did I hear
him talk of anything but these subjects. Oh, yes,
once he told me that I could buy my special shade
of blue ties cheaper from a firm in Burlington
Arcade than from my own people in New York. And I
have bought my ties from that firm ever since.
Otherwise I should not remember the name of the
Burlington Arcade. I wonder what it looks like.
I have never seen it. I imagine it to be two
immense rows of pillars, like those of the Forum
at Rome, with Edward Ashburnham striding down
between them. But it probably isn't--the least
like that. Once also he advised me to buy
Caledonian Deferred, since they were due to rise.
And I did buy them and they did rise. But of how
he got the knowledge I haven't the faintest idea.
It seemed to drop out of the blue sky.

And that was absolutely all that I knew of him
until a month ago--that and the profusion of his
cases, all of pigskin and stamped with his
initials, E. F. A. There were gun cases, and
collar cases, and shirt cases, and letter cases
and cases each containing four bottles of
medicine; and hat cases and helmet cases. It must
have needed a whole herd of the Gadarene swine to
make up his outfit. And, if I ever penetrated
into his private room it would be to see him
standing, with his coat and waistcoat off and the
immensely long line of his perfectly elegant
trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would
have a slightly reflective air and he would be
just opening one kind of case and just closing
another.

Good God, what did they all see in him? for I
swear there was all there was of him, inside and
out; though they said he was a good soldier. Yet,
Leonora adored him with a passion that was like an
agony, and hated him with an agony that was as
bitter as the sea. How could he arouse anything
like a sentiment, in anybody?

What did he even talk to them about--when they
were under four eyes? --Ah, well, suddenly, as if
by a flash of inspiration, I know. For all good
soldiers are sentimentalists--all good soldiers of
that type. Their profession, for one thing, is
full of the big words, courage, loyalty, honour,
constancy. And I have given a wrong impression of
Edward Ashburnham if I have made you think that
literally never in the course of our nine years of
intimacy did he discuss what he would have called
"the graver things." Even before his
final outburst to me, at times, very late at
night, say, he has blurted out something that gave
an insight into the sentimental view of the cosmos
that was his. He would say how much the society
of a good woman could do towards redeeming you,
and he would say that constancy was the finest of
the virtues. He said it very stiffly, of course,
but still as if the statement admitted of no
doubt.

Constancy! Isn't that the queer thought? And
yet, I must add that poor dear Edward was a great
reader--he would pass hours lost in novels of a
sentimental type--novels in which typewriter girls
married Marquises and governesses Earls. And in
his books, as a rule, the course of true love ran
as smooth as buttered honey. And he was fond of
poetry, of a certain type--and he could even read
a perfectly sad love story. I have seen his eyes
filled with tears at reading of a hopeless
parting. And he loved, with a sentimental
yearning, all children, puppies, and the feeble
generally. . . .

So, you see, he would have plenty to gurgle
about to a woman--with that and his sound common
sense about martingales and his--still
sentimental--experiences as a county magistrate;
and with his intense, optimistic belief that the
woman he was making love to at the moment was
the one he was destined, at last, to be eternally
constant to. . . . Well, I fancy he could put up
a pretty good deal of talk when there was no man
around to make him feel shy. And I was quite
astonished, during his final burst out to me--at
the very end of things, when the poor girl was on
her way to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying
to persuade himself and me that he had never
really cared for her--I was quite astonished to
observe how literary and how just his expressions
were. He talked like quite a good book--a book
not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see, I
suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I
had to be regarded as a woman or a solicitor.
Anyhow, it burst out of him on that horrible
night. And then, next morning, he took me over to
the Assizes and I saw how, in a perfectly calm and
business-like way, he set to work to secure a
verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the
daughter of one of his tenants, who had been
accused of murdering her baby. He spent two
hundred pounds on her defence . . . Well, that
was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as
blue as the sides of a certain type of box of
matches. When you looked at them carefully you
saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly
straightforward, perfectly, perfectly stupid. But
the brick pink of his complexion, running
perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner
eyelids, gave them a curious, sinister
expression--like a mosaic of blue porcelain set in
pink china. And that chap, coming into a room,
snapped up the gaze of every woman in it, as
dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.
It was most amazing. You know the man on the
stage who throws up sixteen balls at once and they
all drop into pockets all over his person, on his
shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his
sleeves; and he stands perfectly still and does
nothing. Well, it was like that. He had rather a
rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I
was looking at him, with my back to the screen.
And suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions
flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce
did they do it, those unflinching blue eyes with
the direct gaze? For the eyes themselves never
moved, gazing over my shoulder towards the screen.
And the gaze was perfectly level and perfectly
direct and perfectly unchanging. I suppose that
the lids really must have rounded themselves a
little and perhaps the lips moved a little too, as
if he should be saying: "There you are, my
dear." At any rate, the expression was that
of pride, of satisfaction, of the possessor. I
saw him once afterwards, for a moment, gaze upon
the sunny fields of Branshaw and say: "All
this is my land!"

And then again, the gaze was perhaps more
direct, harder if possible--hardy too. It was a
measuring look; a challenging look. Once when we
were at Wiesbaden watching him play in a polo
match against the Bonner Hussaren I saw the same
look come into his eyes, balancing the
possibilities, looking over the ground. The
German Captain, Count Baron Idigon von
Lelöffel, was right up by their goal posts,
coming with the ball in an easy canter in that
tricky German fashion. The rest of the field were
just anywhere. It was only a scratch sort of
affair. Ashburnham was quite close to the rails
not five yards from us and I heard him saying to
himself: "Might just be done!" And he
did it. Goodness! he swung that pony round with
all its four legs spread out, like a cat dropping
off a roof. . . .

Well, it was just that look that I noticed in
his eyes: "It might," I seem even now to
hear him muttering to himself, "just be
done."

I looked round over my shoulder and saw, tall,
smiling brilliantly and buoyant--Leonora. And,
little and fair, and as radiant as the track of
sunlight along the sea--my wife.

That poor wretch! to think that he was at that
moment in a perfect devil of a fix, and there he
was, saying at the back of his mind: "It
might just be done." It was like a chap in
the middle of the eruption of a volcano, saying
that he might just manage to bolt into the tumult
and set fire to a haystack. Madness?
Predestination? Who the devil knows?

Mrs Ashburnham exhibited at that moment more
gaiety than I have ever since known her to show.
There are certain classes of English people--the
nicer ones when they have been to many spas, who
seem to make a point of becoming much more than
usually animated when they are introduced to my
compatriots. I have noticed this often. Of
course, they must first have accepted the
Americans. But that once done, they seem to say
to themselves: "Hallo, these women are so
bright. We aren't going to be outdone in
brightness." And for the time being they
certainly aren't. But it wears off. So it was
with Leonora--at least until she noticed me. She
began, Leonora did--and perhaps it was that that
gave me the idea of a touch of insolence in her
character, for she never afterwards did any one
single thing like it--she began by saying in quite
a loud voice and from quite a distance:

"Don't stop over by that stuffy old table,
Teddy. Come and sit by these nice
people!"

And that was an extraordinary thing to say.
Quite extraordinary. I couldn't for the life of
me refer to total strangers as nice people. But,
of course, she was taking a line of her own in
which I at any rate--and no one else in the room,
for she too had taken the trouble to read through
the list of guests--counted any more than so many
clean, bull terriers. And she sat down rather
brilliantly at a vacant table, beside ours--one
that was reserved for the Guggenheimers. And she
just sat absolutely deaf to the remonstrances of
the head waiter with his face like a grey ram's.
That poor chap was doing his steadfast duty too.
He knew that the Guggenheimers of Chicago, after
they had stayed there a month and had worried the
poor life out of him, would give him two dollars
fifty and grumble at the tipping system. And he
knew that Teddy Ashburnham and his wife would give
him no trouble whatever except what the smiles of
Leonora might cause in his apparently
unimpressionable bosom--though you never can tell
what may go on behind even a not quite spotless
plastron! --And every week Edward Ashburnham
would give him a solid, sound, golden English
sovereign. Yet this stout fellow was intent on
saving that table for the Guggenheimers of
Chicago. It ended in Florence saying:

"Why shouldn't we all eat out of the same
trough? --that's a nasty New York saying. But
I'm sure we're all nice quiet people and there can
be four seats at our table. It's round."

Then came, as it were, an appreciative gurgle
from the Captain and I was perfectly aware of a
slight hesitation--a quick sharp motion in Mrs
Ashburnham, as if her horse had checked. But she
put it at the fence all right, rising from the
seat she had taken and sitting down opposite me,
as it were, all in one motion.

I never thought that Leonora looked her best in
evening dress. She seemed to get it too clearly
cut, there was no ruffling. She always affected
black and her shoulders were too classical. She
seemed to stand out of her corsage as a white
marble bust might out of a black Wedgwood vase. I
don't know.

I loved Leonora always and, today, I would very
cheerfully lay down my life, what is left of it,
in her service. But I am sure I never had the
beginnings of a trace of what is called the sex
instinct towards her. And I suppose--no I am
certain that she never had it towards me. As far
as I am concerned I think it was those white
shoulders that did it. I seemed to feel when I
looked at them that, if ever I should press my
lips upon them that they would be slightly
cold--not icily, not without a touch of human
heat, but, as they say of baths, with the chill
off. I seemed to feel chilled at the end of my
lips when I looked at her . . .

No, Leonora always appeared to me at her best
in a blue tailor-made. Then her glorious hair
wasn't deadened by her white shoulders. Certain
women's lines guide your eyes to their necks,
their eyelashes, their lips, their breasts. But
Leonora's seemed to conduct your gaze always to
her wrist. And the wrist was at its best in a
black or a dog-skin glove and there was always a
gold circlet with a little chain supporting a very
small golden key to a dispatch box. Perhaps it
was that in which she locked up her heart and her
feelings.

Anyhow, she sat down opposite me and then, for
the first time, she paid any attention to my
existence. She gave me, suddenly, yet
deliberately, one long stare. Her eyes too were
blue and dark and the eyelids were so arched that
they gave you the whole round of the irises. And
it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as
if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me. I
seemed to perceive the swift questions chasing
each other through the brain that was behind them.
I seemed to hear the brain ask and the eyes answer
with all the simpleness of a woman who was a good
hand at taking in qualities of a horse--as indeed
she was. "Stands well; has plenty of room
for his oats behind the girth. Not so much in the
way of shoulders," and so on. And so her
eyes asked: "Is this man trustworthy in money
matters; is he likely to try to play the lover; is
he likely to let his women be troublesome? Is he,
above all, likely to babble about my
affairs?"

And, suddenly, into those cold, slightly
defiant, almost defensive china blue orbs, there
came a warmth, a tenderness, a friendly
recognition . . . oh, it was very charming and
very touching--and quite mortifying. It was the
look of a mother to her son, of a sister to her
brother. It implied trust; it implied the want of
any necessity for barriers. By God, she looked at
me as if I were an invalid--as any kind woman may
look at a poor chap in a bath chair. And, yes,
from that day forward she always treated me and
not Florence as if I were the invalid. Why, she
would run after me with a rug upon chilly days. I
suppose, therefore, that her eyes had made a
favourable answer. Or, perhaps, it wasn't a
favourable answer. And then Florence said:
"And so the whole round table is begun."
Again Edward Ashburnham gurgled slightly in his
throat; but Leonora shivered a little, as if a
goose had walked over her grave. And I was
passing her the nickel-silver basket of rolls.
Avanti! . . .

IV

So began those nine years of uninterrupted
tranquillity. They were characterized by an
extraordinary want of any communicativeness on the
part of the Ashburnhams to which we, on our part,
replied by leaving out quite as extraordinarily,
and nearly as completely, the personal note.
Indeed, you may take it that what characterized
our relationship was an atmosphere of taking
everything for granted. The given proposition
was, that we were all "good people." We
took for granted that we all liked beef underdone
but not too underdone; that both men preferred a
good liqueur brandy after lunch; that both women
drank a very light Rhine wine qualified with
Fachingen water--that sort of thing. It was also
taken for granted that we were both sufficiently
well off to afford anything that we could
reasonably want in the way of amusements fitting
to our station--that we could take motor cars and
carriages by the day; that we could give each
other dinners and dine our friends and we could
indulge if we liked in economy. Thus, Florence
was in the habit of having the Daily
Telegraph sent to her every day from
London. She was always an Anglo-maniac, was
Florence; the Paris edition of the New York
Herald was always good enough for me.
But when we discovered that the Ashburnhams' copy
of the London paper followed them from England,
Leonora and Florence decided between them to
suppress one subscription one year and the other
the next. Similarly it was the habit of the Grand
Duke of Nassau Schwerin, who came yearly to the
baths, to dine once with about eighteen families
of regular Kur guests. In return he would give a
dinner of all the eighteen at once. And, since
these dinners were rather expensive (you had to
take the Grand Duke and a good many of his suite
and any members of the diplomatic bodies that
might be there)--Florence and Leonora, putting
their heads together, didn't see why we shouldn't
give the Grand Duke his dinner together. And so
we did. I don't suppose the Serenity minded that
economy, or even noticed it. At any rate, our
joint dinner to the Royal Personage gradually
assumed the aspect of a yearly function. Indeed,
it grew larger and larger, until it became a sort
of closing function for the season, at any rate as
far as we were concerned.

I don't in the least mean to say that we were
the sort of persons who aspired to mix "with
royalty." We didn't; we hadn't any claims; we
were just "good people." But the Grand
Duke was a pleasant, affable sort of royalty, like
the late King Edward VII, and it was pleasant to
hear him talk about the races and, very
occasionally, as a bonne bouche, about his nephew,
the Emperor; or to have him pause for a moment in
his walk to ask after the progress of our cures or
to be benignantly interested in the amount of
money we had put on Lelöffel's hunter for the
Frankfurt Welter Stakes.

But upon my word, I don't know how we put in
our time. How does one put in one's time? How is
it possible to have achieved nine years and to
have nothing whatever to show for it? Nothing
whatever, you understand. Not so much as a bone
penholder, carved to resemble a chessman and with
a hole in the top through which you could see four
views of Nauheim. And, as for experience, as for
knowledge of one's fellow beings--nothing either.
Upon my word, I couldn't tell you offhand whether
the lady who sold the so expensive violets at the
bottom of the road that leads to the station, was
cheating me or no; I can't say whether the porter
who carried our traps across the station at
Leghorn was a thief or no when he said that the
regular tariff was a lira a parcel. The instances
of honesty that one comes across in this world are
just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty.
After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind,
one ought to have acquired the habit of being able
to know something about one's fellow beings. But
one doesn't.

I think the modern civilized habit--the modern
English habit of taking every one for granted--is
a good deal to blame for this. I have observed
this matter long enough to know the queer, subtle
thing that it is; to know how the faculty, for
what it is worth, never lets you down.

Mind, I am not saying that this is not the most
desirable type of life in the world; that it is
not an almost unreasonably high standard. For it
is really nauseating, when you detest it, to have
to eat every day several slices of thin, tepid,
pink india rubber, and it is disagreeable to have
to drink brandy when you would prefer to be
cheered up by warm, sweet Kümmel. And it is
nasty to have to take a cold bath in the morning
when what you want is really a hot one at night.
And it stirs a little of the faith of your fathers
that is deep down within you to have to have it
taken for granted that you are an Episcopalian
when really you are an old-fashioned Philadelphia
Quaker.

But these things have to be done; it is the
cock that the whole of this society owes to
Æsculapius.

And the odd, queer thing is that the whole
collection of rules applies to anybody--to the
anybodies that you meet in hotels, in railway
trains, to a less degree, perhaps, in steamers,
but even, in the end, upon steamers. You meet a
man or a woman and, from tiny and intimate sounds,
from the slightest of movements, you know at once
whether you are concerned with good people or with
those who won't do. You know, this is to say,
whether they will go rigidly through with the
whole programme from the underdone beef to the
Anglicanism. It won't matter whether they be
short or tall; whether the voice squeak like a
marionette or rumble like a town bull's; it won't
matter whether they are Germans, Austrians,
French, Spanish, or even Brazilians-- they will be
the Germans or Brazilians who take a cold bath
every morning and who move, roughly speaking, in
diplomatic circles.

But the inconvenient--well, hang it all, I will
say it--the damnable nuisance of the whole thing
is, that with all the taking for granted, you
never really get an inch deeper than the things I
have catalogued.

I can give you a rather extraordinary instance
of this. I can't remember whether it was in our
first year--the first year of us four at Nauheim,
because, of course, it would have been the fourth
year of Florence and myself--but it must have been
in the first or second year. And that gives the
measure at once of the extraordinariness of our
discussion and of the swiftness with which
intimacy had grown up between us. On the one hand
we seemed to start out on the expedition so
naturally and with so little preparation, , that
it was as if we must have made many such
excursions before; and our intimacy seemed so
deep. . . .

Yet the place to which we went was obviously
one to which Florence at least would have wanted
to take us quite early, so that you would almost
think we should have gone there together at the
beginning of our intimacy. Florence was
singularly expert as a guide to archaeological
expeditions and there was nothing she liked so
much as taking people round ruins and showing you
the window from which some one looked down upon
the murder of some one else. She only did it
once; but she did it quite magnificently. She
could find her way, with the sole help of
Baedeker, as easily about any old monument as she
could about any American city where the blocks are
all square and the streets all numbered, so that
you can go perfectly easily from Twenty-fourth to
Thirtieth.

Now it happens that fifty minutes away from
Nauheim, by a good train, is the ancient city of
M----, upon a great pinnacle of basalt, girt with
a triple road running sideways up its shoulder
like a scarf. And at the top there is a
castle--not a square castle like Windsor, but a
castle all slate gables and high peaks with gilt
weathercocks flashing bravely--the castle of St
Elizabeth of Hungary. It has the disadvantage of
being in Prussia; and it is always disagreeable to
go into that country; but it is very old and there
are many double-spired churches and it stands up
like a pyramid out of the green valley of the
Lahn. I don't suppose the Ashburnhams wanted
especially to go there and I didn't especially
want to go there myself. But, you understand,
there was no objection. It was part of the cure
to make an excursion three or four times a week.
So that we were all quite unanimous in being
grateful to Florence for providing the motive
power. Florence, of course, had a motive of her
own. She was at that time engaged in educating
Captain Ashburnham--oh, of course, quite pour le
bon motif! She used to say to Leonora: "I
simply can't understand how you can let him live
by your side and be so ignorant!" Leonora
herself always struck me as being remarkably well
educated. At any rate, she knew beforehand all
that Florence had to tell her. Perhaps she got it
up out of Baedeker before Florence was up in the
morning. I don't mean to say that you would ever
have known that Leonora knew anything, but if
Florence started to tell us how Ludwig the
Courageous wanted to have three wives at once--in
which he differed from Henry VIII, who wanted them
one after the other, and this caused a good deal
of trouble--if Florence started to tell us this,
Leonora would just nod her head in a way that
quite pleasantly rattled my poor wife.

She used to exclaim: "Well, if you knew
it, why haven't you told it all already to Captain
Ashburnham? I'm sure he finds it
interesting!" And Leonora would look
reflectively at her husband and say: "I have
an idea that it might injure his hand--the hand,
you know, used in connection with horses' mouths.
. . ." And poor Ashburnham would blush and
mutter and would say: "That's all right.
Don't you bother about me."

I fancy his wife's irony did quite alarm poor
Teddy; because one evening he asked me seriously
in the smoking-room if I thought that having too
much in one's head would really interfere with
one's quickness in polo. It struck him, he said,
that brainy Johnnies generally were rather muffs
when they got on to four legs. I reassured him as
best I could. I told him that he wasn't likely to
take in enough to upset his balance. At that time
the Captain was quite evidently enjoying being
educated by Florence. She used to do it about
three or four times a week under the approving
eyes of Leonora and myself. It wasn't, you
understand, systematic. It came in bursts. It
was Florence clearing up one of the dark places of
the earth, leaving the world a little lighter than
she had found it. She would tell him the story of
Hamlet; explain the form of a symphony, humming
the first and second subjects to him, and so on;
she would explain to him the difference between
Arminians and Erastians; or she would give him a
short lecture on the early history of the United
States. And it was done in a way well calculated
to arrest a young attention. Did you ever read
Mrs Markham? Well, it was like that. . . .

But our excursion to M---- was a much larger, a
much more full dress affair. You see, in the
archives of the Schloss in that city there was a
document which Florence thought would finally give
her the chance to educate the whole lot of us
together. It really worried poor Florence that
she couldn't, in matters of culture, ever get the
better of Leonora. I don't know what Leonora knew
or what she didn't know, but certainly she was
always there whenever Florence brought out any
information. And she gave, somehow, the
impression of really knowing what poor Florence
gave the impression of having only picked up. I
can't exactly define it. It was almost something
physical. Have you ever seen a retriever dashing
in play after a greyhound? You see the two
running over a green field, almost side by side,
and suddenly the retriever makes a friendly snap
at the other. And the greyhound simply isn't
there. You haven't observed it quicken its speed
or strain a limb; but there it is, just two yards
in front of the retriever's outstretched muzzle.
So it was with Florence and Leonora in matters of
culture.

But on this occasion I knew that something was
up. I found Florence some days before, reading
books like Ranke's History of the
Popes, Symonds' Renaissance,
Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic
and Luther's Table Talk.

I must say that, until the astonishment came, I
got nothing but pleasure out of the little
expedition. I like catching the two-forty; I like
the slow, smooth roll of the great big trains--and
they are the best trains in the world! I like
being drawn through the green country and looking
at it through the clear glass of the great
windows. Though, of course, the country isn't
really green. The sun shines, the earth is blood
red and purple and red and green and red. And the
oxen in the ploughlands are bright varnished brown
and black and blackish purple; and the peasants
are dressed in the black and white of magpies; and
there are great Rocks of magpies too. Or the
peasants' dresses in another field where there are
little mounds of hay that will be grey-green on
the sunny side and purple in the shadows--the
peasants' dresses are vermilion with emerald green
ribbons and purple skirts and white shirts and
black velvet stomachers. Still, the impression is
that you are drawn through brilliant green meadows
that run away on each side to the dark purple
fir-woods; the basalt pinnacles; the immense
forests. And there is meadowsweet at the edge of
the streams, and cattle. Why, I remember on that
afternoon I saw a brown cow hitch its horns under
the stomach of a black and white animal and the
black and white one was thrown right into the
middle of a narrow stream. I burst out laughing.
But Florence was imparting information so hard and
Leonora was listening so intently that no one
noticed me. As for me, I was pleased to be off
duty; I was pleased to think that Florence for the
moment was indubitably out of mischief--because
she was talking about Ludwig the Courageous (I
think it was Ludwig the Courageous but I am not an
historian) about Ludwig the Courageous of Hessen
who wanted to have three wives at once and
patronized Luther--something like that!--I was so
relieved to be off duty, because she couldn't
possibly be doing anything to excite herself or
set her poor heart a-fluttering--that the incident
of the cow was a real joy to me. I chuckled over
it from time to time for the whole rest of the
day. Because it does look very funny, you know,
to see a black and white cow land on its back in
the middle of a stream. It is so just exactly
what one doesn't expect of a cow.

I suppose I ought to have pitied the poor
animal; but I just didn't. I was out for
enjoyment. And I just enjoyed myself. It is so
pleasant to be drawn along in front of the
spectacular towns with the peaked castles and the
many double spires. In the sunlight gleams come
from the city--gleams from the glass of windows;
from the gilt signs of apothecaries; from the
ensigns of the student corps high up in the
mountains; from the helmets of the funny little
soldiers moving their stiff little legs in white
linen trousers. And it was pleasant to get out in
the great big spectacular Prussian station with
the hammered bronze ornaments and the paintings of
peasants and flowers and cows; and to hear
Florence bargain energetically with the driver of
an ancient droschka drawn by two lean horses. Of
course, I spoke German much more correctly than
Florence, though I never could rid myself quite of
the accent of the Pennsylvania Duitsch of my
childhood. Anyhow, we were drawn in a sort of
triumph, for five marks without any trinkgeld,
right up to the castle. And we were taken through
the museum and saw the fire-backs, the old glass,
the old swords and the antique contraptions. And
we went up winding corkscrew staircases and
through the Rittersaal, the great painted hall
where the Reformer and his friends met for the
first time under the protection of the gentleman
that had three wives at once and formed an
alliance with the gentleman that had six wives,
one after the other (I'm not really interested in
these facts but they have a bearing on my story).
And we went through chapels, and music rooms,
right up immensely high in the air to a large old
chamber, full of presses, with heavily-shuttered
windows all round. And Florence became positively
electric. She told the tired, bored custodian
what shutters to open; so that the bright sunlight
streamed in palpable shafts into the dim old
chamber. She explained that this was Luther's
bedroom and that just where the sunlight fell had
stood his bed. As a matter of fact, I believe
that she was wrong and that Luther only stopped,
as it were, for lunch, in order to evade pursuit.
But, no doubt, it would have been his bedroom if
he could have been persuaded to stop the night.
And then, in spite of the protest of the
custodian, she threw open another shutter and came
tripping back to a large glass case.

"And there," she exclaimed with an
accent of gaiety, of triumph, and of audacity.
She was pointing at a piece of paper, like the
half-sheet of a letter with some faint pencil
scrawls that might have been a jotting of the
amounts we were spending during the day. And I
was extremely happy at her gaiety, in her triumph,
in her audacity. Captain Ashburnham had his hands
upon the glass case. "There it is--the
Protest." And then, as we all properly
stage-managed our bewilderment, she continued:
"Don't you know that is why we were all
called Protestants? That is the pencil draft of
the Protest they drew up. You can see the
signatures of Martin Luther, and Martin Bucer, and
Zwingli, and Ludwig the Courageous. . . ."

I may have got some of the names wrong, but I
know that Luther and Bucer were there. And her
animation continued and I was glad. She was
better and she was out of mischief. She
continued, looking up into Captain Ashburnham's
eyes: "It's because of that piece of paper
that you're honest, sober, industrious, provident,
and clean-lived. If it weren't for that piece of
paper you'd be like the Irish or the Italians or
the Poles, but particularly the Irish. . . ."

And she laid one finger upon Captain
Ashburnham' s wrist.

I was aware of something treacherous, something
frightful, something evil in the day. I can't
define it and can't find a simile for it. It
wasn't as if a snake had looked out of a hole.
No, it was as if my heart had missed a beat. It
was as if we were going to run and cry out; all
four of us in separate directions, averting our
heads. In Ashburnham's face I know that there was
absolute panic. I was horribly frightened and
then I discovered that the pain in my left wrist
was caused by Leonora's clutching it:

"I can't stand this," she said with a
most extraordinary passion; "I must get out
of this."

I was horribly frightened. It came to me for a
moment, though I hadn't time to think it, that she
must be a madly jealous woman--jealous of Florence
and Captain Ashburnham, of all people in the
world! And it was a panic in which we fled! We
went right down the winding stairs, across the
immense Rittersaal to a little terrace that
overlooks the Lahn, the broad valley and the
immense plain into which it opens out.

"Don't you see?" she said,
"don't you see what's going on?" The
panic again stopped my heart. I muttered, I
stuttered--I don't know how I got the words
out:

"No! What's the matter? Whatever's the
matter?"

She looked me straight in the eyes; and for a
moment I had the feeling that those two blue discs
were immense, were overwhelming, were like a wall
of blue that shut me off from the rest of the
world. I know it sounds absurd; but that is what
it did feel like.

"Don't you see," she said, with a
really horrible bitterness, with a really horrible
lamentation in her voice, "Don't you see that
that's the cause of the whole miserable affair; of
the whole sorrow of the world? And of the eternal
damnation of you and me and them. . .
."

I don't remember how she went on; I was too
frightened; I was too amazed. I think I was
thinking of running to fetch assistance--a doctor,
perhaps, or Captain Ashburnham. Or possibly she
needed Florence's tender care, though, of course,
it would have been very bad for Florence's heart.
But I know that when I came out of it she was
saying: "Oh, where are all the bright, happy,
innocent beings in the world? Where's happiness?
One reads of it in books!"

She ran her hand with a singular clawing motion
upwards over her forehead. Her eyes were
enormously distended; her face was exactly that of
a person looking into the pit of hell and seeing
horrors there. And then suddenly she stopped.
She was, most amazingly, just Mrs Ashburnham
again. Her face was perfectly clear, sharp and
defined; her hair was glorious in its golden
coils. Her nostrils twitched with a sort of
contempt. She appeared to look with interest at a
gypsy caravan that was coming over a little bridge
far below us.

"Don't you know," she said, in her
clear hard voice, "don't you know that I'm an
Irish Catholic?"

V

THOSE words gave me the greatest relief that I
have ever had in my life. They told me, I think,
almost more than I have ever gathered at any one
moment--about myself. I don't think that before
that day I had ever wanted anything very much
except Florence. I have, of course, had
appetites, impatiences . . . Why, sometimes at
a table d'hôte, when there would be, say,
caviare handed round, I have been absolutely full
of impatience for fear that when the dish came to
me there should not be a satisfying portion left
over by the other guests. I have been exceedingly
impatient at missing trains. The Belgian State
Railway has a trick of letting the French trains
miss their connections at Brussels. That has
always infuriated me. I have written about it
letters to The Times that The
Times never printed; those that I wrote to
the Paris edition of the New York
Herald were always printed, but they
never seemed to satisfy me when I saw them. Well,
that was a sort of frenzy with me.

It was a frenzy that now I can hardly realize.
I can understand it intellectually. You see, in
those days I was interested in people with
"hearts." There was Florence, there was
Edward Ashburnham--or, perhaps, it was Leonora
that I was more interested in. I don't mean in
the way of love. But, you see, we were both of
the. same profession--at any rate as I saw it.
And the profession was that of keeping heart
patients alive.

You have no idea how engrossing such a
profession may become. Just as the blacksmith
says: "By hammer and hand all Art doth
stand," just as the baker thinks that all the
solar system revolves around his morning delivery
of rolls, as the postmaster-general believes that
he alone is the preserver of society--and surely,
surely, these delusions are necessary to keep us
going--so did I and, as I believed, Leonora,
imagine that the whole world ought to be arranged
so as to ensure the keeping alive of heart
patients. You have no idea how engrossing such a
profession may become--how imbecile, in view of
that engrossment, appear the ways of princes, of
republics, of municipalities. A rough bit of road
beneath the motor tyres, a couple of succeeding
"thank'ee-marms" with their quick jolts
would be enough to set me grumbling to Leonora
against the Prince or the Grand Duke or the Free
City through whose territory we might be passing.
I would grumble like a stockbroker whose
conversations over the telephone are incommoded by
the ringing of bells from a city church. I would
talk about medieval survivals, about the taxes
being surely high enough. The point, by the way,
about the missing of the connections of the Calais
boat trains at Brussels was that the shortest
possible sea journey is frequently of great
importance to sufferers from the heart. Now, on
the Continent, there are two special heart cure
places, Nauheim and Spa, and to reach both of
these baths from England if in order to ensure a
short sea passage, you come by Calais--you have to
make the connection at Brussels. And the Belgian
train never waits by so much the shade of a second
for the one coming from Calais or from Paris. And
even if the French train, are just on time, you
have to run--imagine a heart patient running!
--along the unfamiliar ways of the Brussels
station and to scramble up the high steps of the
moving train. Or, if you miss connection, you
have to wait five or six hours. . . . I used
to keep awake whole nights cursing that abuse.

My wife used to run--she never, in whatever
else she may have misled me, tried to give me the
impression that she was not a gallant soul. But,
once in the German Express, she would lean back,
with one hand to her side and her eyes closed.
Well, she was a good actress. And I would be in
hell. In hell, I tell you. For in Florence I had
at once a wife and an unattained mistress--that is
what it comes to--and in the retaining of her in
this world I had my occupation, my career, my
ambition. It is not often that these things are
united in one body. Leonora was a good actress
too. By Jove she was good! I tell you, she would
listen to me by the hour, evolving my plans for a
shock-proof world. It is true that, at times, I
used to notice about her an air of inattention as
if she were listening, a mother, to the child at
her knee, or as if, precisely, I were myself the
patient.

You understand that there was nothing the
matter with Edward Ashburnham's heart--that he had
thrown up his commission and had left India and
come half the world over in order to follow a
woman who had really had a "heart" to
Nauheim. That was the sort of sentimental ass he
was. For, you understand, too, that they really
needed to live in India, to economize, to let the
house at Branshaw Teleragh.

Of course, at that date, I had never heard of
the Kilsyte case. Ashburnham had, you know,
kissed a servant girl in a railway train, and it
was only the grace of God, the prompt functioning
of the communication cord and the ready sympathy
of what I believe you call the Hampshire Bench,
that kept the poor devil out of Winchester Gaol
for years and years. I never heard of that case
until the final stages of Leonora's
revelations. . . .

But just think of that poor wretch. . . . I,
who have surely the right, beg you to think of
that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a
luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and
inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to
think of it. None. I have the right to say it,
since for years he was my wife's lover, since he
killed her, since he broke up all the
pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There
is no priest that has the right to tell me that I
must not ask pity for him, from you, silent
listener beyond the hearth-stone, from the world,
or from the God who created in him those desires,
those madnesses. . . .

Of course, I should not hear of the Kilsyte
case. I knew none of their friends; they were for
me just good people--fortunate people with broad
and sunny acres in a southern county. Just good
people! By heavens, I sometimes think that it
would have been better for him, poor dear, if the
case had been such a one that I must needs have
heard of it--such a one as maids and couriers and
other Kur guests whisper about for years after,
until gradually it dies away in the pity that
there is knocking about here and there in the
world. Supposing he had spent his seven years in
Winchester Gaol or whatever it is that inscrutable
and blind justice allots to you for following your
natural but ill-timed inclinations--there would
have arrived a stage when nodding gossips on the
Kursaal terrace would have said, "Poor
fellow," thinking of his ruined career. He
would have been the fine soldier with his back now
bent. . . . Better for him, poor devil, if his
back had been prematurely bent.

Why, it would have been a thousand times
better. . . . For, of course, the Kilsyte case,
which came at the very beginning of his finding
Leonora cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty
jar. He left servants alone after that.

It turned him, naturally, all the more loose
amongst women of his own class. Why, Leonora told
me that Mrs Maidan--the woman he followed from
Burma to Nauheim--assured her he awakened her
attention by swearing that when he kissed the
servant in the train he was driven to it. I
daresay he was driven to it, by the mad passion to
find an ultimately satisfying woman. I daresay he
was sincere enough. Heaven help me, I daresay he
was sincere enough in his love for Mrs Maidan.
She was a nice little thing, a dear little dark
woman with long lashes, of whom Florence grew
quite fond. She had a lisp and a happy smile. We
saw plenty of her for the first month of our
acquaintance, then she died, quite quietly--of
heart trouble.

But you know, poor little Mrs Maidan--she was
so gentle, so young. She cannot have been more
than twenty-three and she had a boy husband out in
Chitral not more than twenty-four, I believe.
Such young things ought to have been left alone.
Of course Ashburnham could not leave her alone. I
do not believe that he could. Why, even I, at
this distance of time am aware that I am a little
in love with her memory. I can't help smiling
when I think suddenly of her--as you might at the
thought of something wrapped carefully away in
lavender, in some drawer, in some old house that
you have long left. She was so--so submissive.
Why, even to me she had the air of being
submissive--to me that not the youngest child will
ever pay heed to. Yes, this is the saddest story
. . .

No, I cannot help wishing that Florence had
left her alone--with her playing with adultery. I
suppose it was; though she was such a child that
one has the impression that she would hardly have
known how to spell such a word. No, it was just
submissiveness--to the importunities, to the
tempestuous forces that pushed that miserable
fellow on to ruin. And I do not suppose that
Florence really made much difference. If it had
not been for her that Ashburnham left his
allegiance for Mrs Maidan, then it would have been
some other woman. But still, I do not know.
Perhaps the poor young thing would have died--she
was bound to die, anyhow, quite soon--but she
would have died without having to soak her noonday
pillow with tears whilst Florence, below the
window, talked to Captain Ashburnham about the
Constitution of the United States. . . . Yes, it
would have left a better taste in the mouth if
Florence had let her die in peace. . . .

Leonora behaved better in a sense. She just
boxed Mrs Maidan's ears--yes, she hit her, in an
uncontrollable access of rage, a hard blow on the
side of the cheek, in the corridor of the hotel,
outside Edward's rooms. It was that, you know,
that accounted for the sudden, odd intimacy that
sprang up between Florence and Mrs Ashburnham.

Because it was, of course, an odd intimacy. If
you look at it from the outside nothing could have
been more unlikely than that Leonora, who is the
proudest creature on God's earth, would have
struck up an acquaintanceship with two casual
Yankees whom she could not really have regarded as
being much more than a carpet beneath her feet.
You may ask what she had to be proud of. Well,
she was a Powys married to an Ashburnham--I
suppose that gave her the right to despise casual
Americans as long as she did it unostentatiously.
I don't know what anyone has to be proud of. She
might have taken pride in her patience, in her
keeping her husband out of the bankruptcy court.
Perhaps she did.

At any rate that was how Florence got to know
her. She came round a screen at the corner of the
hotel corridor and found Leonora with the gold key
that hung from her wrist caught in Mrs Maidan's
hair just before dinner. There was not a single
word spoken. Little Mrs Maidan was very pale,
with a red mark down her left cheek, and the key
would not come out of her black hair. It was
Florence who had to disentangle it, for Leonora
was in such a state that she could not have
brought herself to touch Mrs Maidan without
growing sick.

And there was not a word spoken. You see,
under those four eyes--her own and Mrs
Maidan's--Leonora could just let herself go as far
as to box Mrs Maidan's ears. But the moment a
stranger came along she pulled herself wonderfully
up. She was at first silent and then, the moment
the key was disengaged by Florence she was in a
state to say: "So awkward of me . . . I
was just trying to put the comb straight in Mrs
Maidan's hair. . . ."

Mrs Maidan, however, was not a Powys married to
an Ashburnham; she was a poor little O'Flaherty
whose husband was a boy of country parsonage
origin. So there was no mistaking the sob she let
go as she went desolately away along the corridor.
But Leonora was still going to play up. She
opened the door of Ashburnham's room quite
ostentatiously, so that Florence should hear her
address Edward in terms of intimacy and liking.
"Edward," she called. But there was no
Edward there.

You understand that there was no Edward there.
It was then, for the only time of her career, that
Leonora really compromised herself--She exclaimed
. . . "How frightful! . . . Poor little
Maisie! . . ."

She caught herself up at that, but of course it
was too late. It was a queer sort of
affair. . . .

I want to do Leonora every justice. I love her
very dearly for one thing and in this matter,
which was certainly the ruin of my small household
cockle-shell, she certainly tripped up. I do not
believe--and Leonora herself does not
believe--that poor little Maisie Maidan was ever
Edward's mistress. Her heart was really so bad
that she would have succumbed to anything like an
impassioned embrace. That is the plain English of
it, and I suppose plain English is best. She was
really what the other two, for reasons of their
own, just pretended to be. Queer, isn't it? Like
one of those sinister jokes that Providence plays
upon one. Add to this that I do not suppose that
Leonora would much have minded, at any other
moment, if Mrs Maidan had been her husband's
mistress. It might have been a relief from
Edward's sentimental gurglings over the lady and
from the lady's submissive acceptance of those
sounds. No, she would not have minded.

But, in boxing Mrs Maidan's ears, Leonora was
just striking the face of an intolerable universe.
For, that afternoon she had had a frightfully
painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the
right to open them when she chose. She arrogated
to herself the right because Edward's affairs were
in such a frightful state and he lied so about
them that she claimed the privilege of having his
secrets at her disposal. There was not, indeed,
any other way, for the poor fool was too ashamed
of his lapses ever to make a clean breast of
anything. She had to drag these things out of
him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for
her. But that afternoon, Edward being on his bed
for the hour and a half prescribed by the Kur
authorities, she had opened a letter that she took
to come from a Colonel Hervey. They were going to
stay with him in Linlithgowshire for the month of
September and she did not know whether the date
fixed would be the eleventh or the eighteenth.
The address on this letter was, in handwriting, as
like Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like
another. So she had at the moment no idea of
spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that
Edward Ashburnham was paying a blackmailer of whom
she had never heard something like three hundred
pounds a year . . . It was a devil of a blow;
it was like death; for she imagined that by that
time she had really got to the bottom of her
husband's liabilities. You see, they were pretty
heavy. What had really smashed them up had been a
perfectly common-place affair at Monte Carlo--an
affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for
the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. She exacted
a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara from him as
the price of her favours for a week or so. It
would have pipped him a good deal to have found so
much, and he was not in the ordinary way a
gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the
twenty thousand and the not slight charges of a
week at an hotel with the fair creature. He must
have been worth at that date five hundred thousand
dollars and a little over.

Well, he must needs go to the tables and lose
forty thousand pounds. . . . Forty thousand
solid pounds, borrowed from sharks! And even
after that he must--it was an imperative
passion--enjoy the favours of the lady. He got
them, of course, when it was a matter of solid
bargaining, for far less than twenty thousand, as
he might, no doubt, have done from the first. I
daresay ten thousand dollars covered the bill.

Anyhow, there was a pretty solid hole in a
fortune of a hundred thousand pounds or so. And
Leonora had to fix things up; he would have run
from money-lender to money-lender. And that was
quite in the early days of her discovery of his
infidelities--if you like to call them
infidelities. And she discovered that one from
public sources. God knows what would have
happened if she had not discovered it from public
sources. I suppose he would have concealed it
from her until they were penniless. But she was
able, by the grace of God, to get hold of the
actual lenders of the money, to learn the exact
sums that were needed. And she went off to
England.

Yes, she went right off to England to her
attorney and his while he was still in the arms of
his Circe--at Antibes, to which place they had
retired. He got sick of the lady quite quickly,
but not before Leonora had had such lessons in the
art of business from her attorney that she had her
plan as clearly drawn up as was ever that of
General Trochu for keeping the Prussians out of
Paris in 1870. It was about as effectual at
first, or it seemed so.

That would have been, you know, in 1895, about
nine years before the date of which I am
talking--the date of Florence's getting her hold
over Leonora; for that was what it amounted to. .
. . Well, Mrs Ashburnham had simply
forced Edward to settle all his property upon her.
She could force him to do anything; in his clumsy,
good-natured, inarticulate way he was as
frightened of her as of the devil. And he admired
her enormously, and he was as fond of her as any
man could be of any woman. She took advantage of
it to treat him as if he had been a person whose
estates are being managed by the Court of
Bankruptcy. I suppose it was the best thing for
him.

Anyhow, she had no end of a job for the first
three years or so. Unexpected liabilities kept on
cropping up--and that afflicted fool did not make
it any easier. You see, along with the passion of
the chase went a frame of mind that made him be
extraordinarily ashamed of himself. You may not
believe it, but he really had such a sort of
respect for the chastity of Leonora's imagination
that he hated--he was positively revolted at the
thought that she should know that the sort of
thing that he did existed in the world. So he
would stick out in an agitated way against the
accusation of ever having done anything. He
wanted to preserve the virginity of his wife's
thoughts. He told me that himself during the long
walks we had at the last--while the girl was on
the way to Brindisi.

So, of course, for those three years or so,
Leonora had many agitations. And it was then that
they really quarrelled.

Yes, they quarrelled bitterly. That seems
rather extravagant. You might have thought that
Leonora would be just calmly loathing and he
lachrymosely contrite. But that was not it a bit
. . . Along with Edward's passions and his shame
for them went the violent conviction of the duties
of his station--a conviction that was quite
unreasonably expensive. I trust I have not, in
talking of his liabilities, given the impression
that poor Edward was a promiscuous libertine. He
was not; he was a sentimentalist. The servant
girl in the Kilsyte case had been pretty, but
mournful of appearance. I think that, when he had
kissed her, he had desired rather to comfort her.
And, if she had succumbed to his blandishments I
daresay he would have set her up in a little house
in Portsmouth or Winchester and would have been
faithful to her for four or five years. He was
quite capable of that.

No, the only two of his affairs of the heart
that cost him money were that of the Grand Duke's
mistress and that which was the subject of the
blackmailing letter that Leonora opened. That had
been a quite passionate affair with quite a nice
woman. It had succeeded the one with the Grand
Ducal lady. The lady was the wife of a brother
officer and Leonora had known all about the
passion, which had been quite a real passion and
had lasted for several years. You see, poor
Edward's passions were quite logical in their
progression upwards. They began with a servant,
went on to a courtesan and then to a quite nice
woman, very unsuitably mated. For she had a quite
nasty husband who, by means of letters and things,
went on blackmailing poor Edward to the tune of
three or four hundred a year--with threats of the
Divorce Court. And after this lady came Maisie
Maidan, and after poor Maisie only one more affair
and then--the real passion of his life. His
marriage with Leonora had been arranged by his
parents and, though he always admired her
immensely, he had hardly ever pretended to be much
more than tender to her, though he desperately
needed her moral support, too. . . .

But his really trying liabilities were mostly
in the nature of generosities proper to his
station. He was, according to Leonora, always
remitting his tenants' rents and giving the
tenants to understand that the reduction would be
permanent; he was always redeeming drunkards who
came before his magisterial bench; he was always
trying to put prostitutes into respectable
places--and he was a perfect maniac about
children. I don't know how many ill-used people
he did not pick up and provide with
careers--Leonora has told me, but I daresay she
exaggerated and the figure seems so preposterous
that I will not put it down. All these things,
and the continuance of them seemed to him to be
his duty--along with impossible subscriptions to
hospitals and Boy Scouts and to provide prizes at
cattle shows and antivivisection
societies. . . .

Well, Leonora saw to it that most of these
things were not continued. They could not
possibly keep up Branshaw Manor at that rate after
the money had gone to the Grand Duke's mistress.
She put the rents back at their old figures;
discharged the drunkards from their homes, and
sent all the societies notice that they were to
expect no more subscriptions. To the children,
she was more tender; nearly all of them she
supported till the age of apprenticeship or
domestic service. You see, she was childless
herself.

She was childless herself, and she considered
herself to be to blame. She had come of a
penniless branch of the Powys family, and they had
forced upon her poor dear Edward without making
the stipulation that the children should be
brought up as Catholics. And that, of course, was
spiritual death to Leonora. I have given you a
wrong impression if I have not made you see that
Leonora was a woman of a strong, cold conscience,
like all English Catholics. (I cannot, myself,
help disliking this religion; there is always, at
the bottom of my mind, in spite of Leonora, the
feeling of shuddering at the Scarlet Woman, that
filtered in upon me in the tranquility of the
little old Friends' Meeting House in Arch Street,
Philadelphia.) So I do set down a good deal of
Leonora's mismanagement of poor dear Edward's case
to the peculiarly English form of her religion.
Because, of course, the only thing to have done
for Edward would have been to let him sink down
until he became a tramp of gentlemanly address,
having, maybe, chance love affairs upon the
highways. He would have done so much less harm;
he would have been much less agonized too. At any
rate, he would have had fewer chances of ruining
and of remorse. For Edward was great at remorse.

But Leonora's English Catholic conscience, her
rigid principles, her coldness, even her very
patience, were, I cannot help thinking, all wrong
in this special case. She quite seriously and
naïvely imagined that the Church of Rome
disapproves of divorce; she quite seriously and
naïvely believed that her church could be
such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to
expect her to take on the impossible job of making
Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as
the English would say, the Nonconformist
temperament. In the United States of North
America we call it the New England conscience.
For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven
in on the English Catholics. The centuries that
they have gone through--centuries of blind and
malignant oppression, of ostracism from public
employment, of being, as it were, a small
beleagured garrison in a hostile country, and
therefore having to act with great formality--all
these things have combined to perform that
conjuring trick. And I suppose that Papists in
England are even technically Nonconformists.

Continental Papists are a dirty, jovial and
unscrupulous crew. But that, at least, lets them
be opportunists. They would have fixed poor dear
Edward up all right. (Forgive my writing of these
monstrous things in this frivolous manner. If I
did not I should break down and cry.) In Milan,
say, or in Paris, Leonora would have had her
marriage dissolved in six months for two hundred
dollars paid in the right quarter. And Edward
would have drifted about until he became a tramp
of the kind I have suggested. Or he would have
married a barmaid who would have made him such
frightful scenes in public places and would so
have torn out his moustache and left visible signs
upon his face that he would have been faithful to
her for the rest of his days. That was what he
wanted to redeem him. . . .

For, along with his passions and his shames
there went the dread of scenes in public places,
of outcry, of excited physical violence; of
publicity, in short. Yes, the barmaid would have
cured him. And it would have been all the better
if she drank; he would have been kept busy looking
after her.

I know that I am right in this. I know it
because of the Kilsyte case. You see, the servant
girl that he then kissed was nurse in the family
of the Nonconformist head of the county--whatever
that post may be called. And that gentleman was
so determined to ruin Edward, who was the chairman
of the Tory caucus, or whatever it is--that the
poor dear sufferer had the very devil of a time.
They asked questions about it in the House of
Commons; they tried to get the Hampshire
magistrates degraded; they suggested to the War
Ministry that Edward was not the proper person to
hold the King's commission. Yes, he got it hot
and strong.

The result you have heard. He was completely
cured of philandering amongst the lower classes.
And that seemed a real blessing to Leonora. It
did not revolt her so much to be connected--it is
a sort of connection--with people like Mrs Maidan,
instead of with a little kitchenmaid.

In a dim sort of way, Leonora was almost
contented when she arrived at Nauheim, that
evening. . . .

She had got things nearly straight by the long
years of scraping in little stations in Chitral
and Burma--stations where living is cheap in
comparison with the life of a county magnate, and
where, moreover, liaisons of one sort or another
are normal and inexpensive too. So that, when Mrs
Maidan came along--and the Maidan affair might
have caused trouble out there because of the youth
of the husband--Leonora had just resigned herself
to coming home. With pushing and scraping and
with letting Branshaw Teleragh, and with selling a
picture and a relic of Charles I or so. had
got--and, poor dear, she had never had a really
decent dress to her back in all those years and
years--she had got, as she imagined, her poor dear
husband back into much the same financial position
as had been his before the mistress of the Grand
Duke had happened along. And, of course, Edward
himself had helped her a little on the financial
side. He was a fellow that many men liked. He
was so presentable and quite ready to lend you
his cigar puncher--that sort of thing. So, every
now and then some financier whom he met about
would give him a good, sound, profitable tip. And
Leonora was never afraid of a bit of a
gamble--English Papists seldom are, I do not know
why.

So nearly all her investment turned up trumps,
and Edward was really in fit case to reopen
Branshaw Manor and once more to assume his
position in the county. Thus Leonora had accepted
Maisie Maidan almost with resignation--almost with
a sigh of relief. She really liked the poor
child--she had to like somebody. And, at any
rate, she felt she could trust Maisie--she could
trust her not to rook Edward for several thousands
a week, for Maisie had refused to accept so much
as a trinket ring from him. It is true that
Edward gurgled and raved about the girl in a way
that she had never yet experienced. But that,
too, was almost a relief. I think she would
really have welcomed it if he could have come
across the love of his life. It would have given
her a rest.

And there could not have been anyone better
than poor little Mrs Maidan; she was so ill she
could not want to be taken on expensive
jaunts. . . . It
was Leonora herself who paid Maisie's expenses to
Nauheim. She handed over the money to the boy
husband, for Maisie would never have allowed it;
but the husband was in agonies of fear. Poor
devil!

I fancy that, on the voyage from India, Leonora
was as happy as ever she had been in her life.
Edward was wrapped up, completely, in his girl--he
was almost like a father with a child, trotting
about with rugs and physic and things, from deck
to deck. He behaved, however, with great
circumspection, so that nothing leaked through to
the other passengers. And Leonora had almost
attained to the attitude of a mother towards Mrs
Maidan. So it had looked very well--the
benevolent, wealthy couple of good people, acting
as saviours to the poor, dark-eyed, dying young
thing. And that attitude of Leonora's towards Mrs
Maidan no doubt partly accounted for the smack in
the face. She was hitting a naughty child who had
been stealing chocolates at an inopportune moment.

It was certainly an inopportune moment. For,
with the opening of that blackmailing letter from
that injured brother officer, all the old terrors
had redescended upon Leonora. Her road had again
seemed to stretch out endless; she imagined that
there might be hundreds and hundreds of such
things that Edward was concealing from her--that
they might necessitate more mortgagings, more
pawnings of bracelets, more and always more
horrors. She had spent an excruciating afternoon.
The matter was one of a divorce case, of course,
and she wanted to avoid publicity as much as
Edward did, so that she saw the necessity of
continuing the payments. And she did not so much
mind that. They could find three hundred a year.
But it was the horror of there being more such
obligations.

She had had no conversation with Edward for
many years--none that went beyond the mere
arrangements for taking trains or engaging
servants. But that afternoon she had to let him
have it. And he had been just the same as ever.
It was like opening a book after a decade to find
the words the same. He had the same motives. He
had not wished to tell her about the case because
he had not wished her to sully her mind with the
idea that there was such a thing as a brother
officer who could be a blackmailer--and he had
wanted to protect the credit of his old light of
love. That lady was certainly not concerned with
her husband. And he swore, and swore, and swore,
that there was nothing else in the world against
him. She did not believe him.

He had done it once too often--and she was
wrong for the first time, so that he acted a
rather creditable part in the matter. For he went
right straight out to the post-office and spent
several hours in coding a telegram to his
solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man to
threaten to take out at once a warrant against the
fellow who was on his track. He said afterwards
that it was a bit too thick on poor old Leonora to
be ballyragged any more. That was really the last
of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready to
take his personal chance of the Divorce Court if
the blackmailer turned nasty. He would face it
out--the publicity, the papers, the whole bally
show. Those were his simple words. . . .

He had made, however, the mistake of not
telling Leonora where he was going, so that,
having seen him go to his room to fetch the code
for the telegram, and seeing, two hours later,
Maisie Maidan come out of his room, Leonora
imagined that the two hours she had spent in
silent agony Edward had spent with Maisie Maidan
in his arms. That seemed to her to be too much.

As a matter of fact, Maisie's being in Edward's
room had been the result, partly of poverty,
partly of pride, partly of sheer innocence. She
could not, in the first place, afford a maid; she
refrained as much as possible from sending the
hotel servants on errands, since every penny was
of importance to her, and she feared to have to
pay high tips at the end of her stay. Edward had
lent her one of his fascinating cases contaiing
fifteen different sizes of scisssors,
and, having seen from
her window, his departure for the post-office, she
had taken the opportunity of returning the case.
She could not see why she should not, though she
felt a certain remorse at the thought that she had
kissed the pillows of his bed. That was the way
it took her.

But Leonora could see that, without the shadow
of a doubt, the incident gave Florence a hold over
her. It let Florence into things and Florence was
the only created being who had any idea that the
Ashburnhams were not just good people with nothing
to their tails. She determined at once, not so
much to give Florence the privilege of her
intimacy--which would have been the payment of a
kind of blackmail--as to keep Florence under
observation until she could have demonstrated to
Florence that she was not in the least jealous of
poor Maisie. So that was why she had entered the
dining-room arm in arm with my wife, and why she
had so markedly planted herself at our table. She
never left us, indeed, for a minute that night,
except just to run up to Mrs Maidan's room to beg
her pardon and to beg her also to let Edward take
her very markedly out into the gardens that night.
She said herself, when Mrs Maidan came rather
wistfully down into the lounge where we were all
sitting: "Now, Edward, get up and take Maisie
to the Casino. I want Mrs Dowell to tell me all
about the families in Connecticut who came from
Fordingbridge." For it had been discovered
that Florence came of a line that had actually
owned Branshaw Teleragh for two centuries before
the Ashburnhams came there. And there she sat
with me in that hall, long after Florence had gone
to bed, so that I might witness her gay reception
of that pair. She could play up.

And that enables me to fix exactly the day of
our going to the town of M----. For it was the
very day poor Mrs Maidan died. We found her dead
when we got back--pretty awful, that, when you come
to figure out what it all means. . . .

At any rate the measure of my relief when
Leonora said that she was an Irish Catholic gives
you the measure of my affection for that couple.
It was an affection so intense that even to this
day I cannot think of Edward without sighing. I
do not believe that I could have gone on any more
with them. I was getting too tired. And I verily
believe, too, if my suspicion that Leonora was
jealous of Florence had been the reason she gave
for her outburst I should have turned upon
Florence with the maddest kind of rage. Jealousy
would have been incurable. But Florence's mere
silly jibes at the Irish and at the Catholics
could be apologized out of existence. And that I
appeared to fix up in two minutes or so.

She looked at me for a long time rather fixedly
and queerly while I was doing it. And at last I
worked myself up to saying:

"Do accept the situation. I confess that
I do not like your religion. But I like you so
intensely. I don't mind saying that I have never
had anyone to be really fond of, and I do not
believe that anyone has ever been fond of me, as I
believe you really to be."

"Oh, I'm fond enough of you," she
said. "Fond enough to say that I wish every
man was like you. But there are others to be
considered." She was thinking, as a matter of
fact, of poor Maisie. She picked a little piece
of pellitory out of the breast-high wall in front
of us. She chafed it for a long minute between
her finger and thumb, then she threw it over the
coping.

"Oh, I accept the situation," she
said at last, "if you can."

VI

I REMEMBER laughing at the phrase, "accept
the situation", which she seemed to repeat
with a gravity too intense. I said to her
something like:

"It's hardly as much as that. I mean,
that I must claim the liberty of a free American
citizen to think what I please about your
co-religionists. And I suppose that Florence must
have liberty to think what she pleases and to say
what politeness allows her to say."

"She had better," Leonora answered,
"not say one single word against my people or
my faith."

It struck me at the time, that there was an
unusual, an almost threatening, hardness in her
voice. It was almost as if she were trying to
convey to Florence, through me, that she would
seriously harm my wife if Florence went to
something that was an extreme. Yes, I remember
thinking at the time that it was almost as if
Leonora were saying, through me to Florence:

"You may outrage me as you will; you may
take all that I personally possess, but do not you
care to say one single thing in view of the
situation that that will set up--against the faith
that makes me become the doormat for your
feet."

But obviously, as I saw it, that could not be
her meaning. Good people, be they ever so diverse
in creed, do not threaten each other. So that I
read Leonora's words to mean just no more than:

"It would be better if Florence said
nothing at all against my co-religionists, because
it is a point that I am touchy about."

That was the hint that, accordingly, I conveyed
to Florence when, shortly afterwards, she and
Edward came down from the tower. And I want you
to understand that, from that moment until after
Edward and the girl and Florence were all dead
together, I had never the remotest glimpse, not
the shadow of a suspicion, that there was anything
wrong, as the saying is. For five minutes, then,
I entertained the possibility that Leonora might
be jealous; but there was never another flicker in
that flame-like personality. How in the world
should I get it?

For, all that time, I was just a male sick
nurse. And what chance had I against those three
hardened gamblers, who were all in league to
conceal their hands from me? What earthly chance?
They were three to one--and they made me happy.
Oh God, they made me so happy that I doubt if even
paradise, that shall smooth out all temporal
wrongs, shall ever give me the like. And what
could they have done better, or what could they
have done that could have been worse? I don't
know. . . .

I suppose that, during all that time I was a
deceived husband and that Leonora was pimping for
Edward. That was the cross that she had to take
up during her long Calvary of a
life. . . .

You ask how it feels to be a deceived husband.
Just Heavens, I do not know. It feels just
nothing at all. It is not Hell, certainly it is
not necessarily Heaven. So I suppose it is the
intermediate stage. What do they call it? Limbo.
No, I feel nothing at all about that. They are
dead; they have gone before their Judge who, I
hope, will open to them the springs of His
compassion. It is not my business to think about
it. It is simply my business to say, as Leonora's
people say: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Do
mine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. In memoria
aeterna erit. . . ." But what were
they? The just? The unjust? God knows! I think
that the pair of them were only poor wretches,
creeping over this earth in the shadow of an
eternal wrath. It is very terrible. . . .

It is almost too terrible, the picture of that
judgement, as it appears to me sometimes, at
nights. It is probably the suggestion of some
picture that I have seen somewhere. But upon an
immense plain, suspended in mid-air, I seem to see
three figures, two of them clasped close in an
intense embrace, and one intolerably solitary. lt
is in black and white, my picture of that
judgement, an etching, perhaps; only I cannot tell
an etching from a photographic reproduction. And
the immense plain is the hand of God, stretching
out for miles and miles, with great spaces above
it and below it. And they are in the sight of
God, and it is Florence that is alone. . . .

And, do you know, at the thought of that
intense solitude I feel an overwhelming desire to
rush forward and comfort her. You cannot, you
see, have acted as nurse to a person for twelve
years without wishing to go on nursing them, even
though you hate them with the hatred of the adder,
and even in the palm of God. But, in the nights,
with that vision of judgement before me, I know
that I hold myself back. For I hate Florence. I
hate Florence with such a hatred that I would not
spare her an eternity of loneliness. She need
not have done what she did. She was an American,
a New Englander. She had not the hot passions of
these Europeans. She cut out that poor imbecile
of an Edward--and I pray God that he is really at
peace, clasped close in the arms of that poor,
poor girl! And, no doubt, Maisie Maidan will find
her young husband again, and Leonora will burn,
clear and serene, a northern light and one of the
archangels of God. And me. . . . Well,
perhaps, they will find me an elevator to run. .
. . But Florence. . . .

She should not have done it. She should not
have done it. It was playing it too low down.
She cut out poor dear Edward from sheer vanity;
she meddled between him and Leonora from a sheer,
imbecile spirit of district visiting. Do you
understand that, whilst she was Edward's mistress,
she was perpetually trying to reunite him to his
wife? She would gabble on to Leonora about
forgiveness--treating the subject from the bright,
American point of view. And Leonora would treat
her like the whore she was. Once she said to
Florence in the early morning:

"You come to me straight out of his bed to
tell me that that is my proper place. I know it,
thank you."

But even that could not stop Florence. She
went on saying that it was her ambition to leave
this world a little brighter by the passage of her
brief life, and how thankfully she would leave
Edward, whom she thought she had brought to a
right frame of mind, if Leonora would only give
him a chance. He needed, she said, tenderness
beyond anything.

And Leonora would answer--for she put up with
this outrage for years--Leonora, as I understand,
would answer something like:

"Yes, you would give him up. And you
would go on writing to each other in secret, and
committing adultery in hired rooms. I know the
pair of you, you know. No. I prefer the
situation as it is."

Half the time Florence would ignore Leonora's
remarks. She would think they were not quite
ladylike. The other half of the time she would
try to persuade Leonora that her love for Edward
was quite spiritual--on account of her heart.
Once she said:

"If you can believe that of Maisie Maidan,
as you say you do, why cannot you believe it of
me?"

Leonora was, I understand, doing her hair at
that time in front of the mirror in her bedroom.
And she looked round at Florence, to whom she did
not usually vouchsafe a glance,--she looked round
coolly and calmly, and said:

"Never do you dare to mention Mrs Maidan's
name again. You murdered her. You and I murdered
her between us. I am as much a scoundrel as you.
I don't like to be reminded of it."

Florence went off at once into a babble of how
could she have hurt a person whom she hardly knew,
a person whom with the best intentions, in
pursuance of her efforts to leave the world a
little brighter, she had tried to save from
Edward. That was how she figured it out to
herself. She really thought that. . . .
So Leonora said patiently:

"Very well, just put it that I killed her
and that it's a painful subject. One does not
like to think that one had killed someone.
Naturally not. I ought never to have brought her
from India."

And that, indeed, is exactly how Leonora looked
at it. It is stated a little baldly, but Leonora
was always a great one for bald statements.

What had happened on the day of our jaunt to
the ancient city of M---- had been this:

Leonora, who had been even then filled with
pity and contrition for the poor child, on
returning to our hotel had gone straight to Mrs
Maidan's room. She had wanted just to pet her.
And she had perceived at first only, on the clear,
round table covered with red velvet, a letter
addressed to her. It ran something like:

"Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, how could you have
done it? I trusted you so. You never talked to
me about me and Edward, but I trusted you. How
could you buy me from my husband? I have just
heard how you have--in the hall they were talking
about it, Edward and the American lady. You paid
the money for me to come here. Oh, how could you?
How could you? I am going straight back to Bunny.
. . ."

Bunny was Mrs Maidan's husband.

And Leonora said that, as she went on reading
the letter, she had, without looking round her, a
sense that that hotel room was cleared, that there
were no papers on the table, that there were no
clothes on the hooks, and that there was a
strained silence--a silence, she said, as if there
were something in the room that drank up such
sounds as there were. She had to fight against
that feeling, whilst she read the postscript of
the letter.

"I did not know you wanted me for an
adulteress," the postscript began. The poor
child was hardly literate. "It was surely
not right of you and I never wanted to be one.
And I heard Edward call me a poor little rat to
the American lady. He always called me a little
rat in private, and I did not mind. But, if he
called me it to her, I think he does not love me
any more. Oh, Mrs Ashburnham, you knew the world
and I knew nothing. I thought it would be all
right if you thought it could, and I thought you
would not have brought me if you did not, too.
You should not have done it, and we out of the
same convent. . . ."

Leonora said that she screamed when she read
that.

And then she saw that Maisie's boxes were all
packed, and she began a search for Mrs Maidan
herself--all over the hotel. The manager said
that Mrs Maidan had paid her bill, and had gone up
to the station to ask the Reiseverkehrsbureau to
make her out a plan for her immediate return to
Chitral. He imagined that he had seen her come
back, but he was not quite certain. No one in the
large hotel had bothered his head about the child.
And she, wandering solitarily in the hall, had no
doubt sat down beside a screen that had Edward and
Florence on the other side. I never heard then or
after what had passed between that precious
couple. I fancy Florence was just about beginning
her cutting out of poor dear Edward by addressing
to him some words of friendly warning as to the
ravages he might be making in the girl's heart.
That would be the sort of way she would begin.
And Edward would have sentimentally assured her
that there was nothing in it; that Maisie was just
a poor little rat whose passage to Nauheim his
wife had paid out of her own pocket. That would
have been enough to do the trick.

For the trick was pretty efficiently done.
Leonora, with panic growing and with contrition
very large in her heart, visited every one of the
public rooms of the hotel--the dining-room, the
lounge, the schreibzimmer, the winter garden. God
knows what they wanted with a winter garden in an
hotel that is only open from May till October.
But there it was. And then Leonora ran--yes, she
ran up the stairs--to see if Maisie had not
returned to her rooms. She had determined to take
that child right away from that hideous place.
It seemed to her to be all unspeakable. I do not
mean to say that she was not quite cool about it.
Leonora was always Leonora. But the cold justice
of the thing demanded that she should play the
part of mother to this child who had come from the
same convent. She figured it out to amount to
that. She would leave Edward to Florence and to
me--and she would devote all her time to providing
that child with an atmosphere of love until she
could be returned to her poor young husband. It
was naturally too late.

She had not cared to look round Maisie's rooms
at first. Now, as soon as she came in, she
perceived, sticking out beyond the bed, a small
pair of feet in high-heeled shoes. Maisie had
died in the effort to strap up a great
portmanteau. She had died so grotesquely that her
little body had fallen forward into the trunk, and
it had closed upon her, like the jaws of a
gigantic alligator. The key was in her hand. Her
dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come
down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest
featherweight--and laid her on the bed with her
hair about her. She was smiling, as if she had
just scored a goal in a hockey match. You
understand she had not committed suicide. Her
heart had just stopped. I saw her, with the long
lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the
lips, with the flowers all about her. The stem of
a white lily rested in her hand so that the spike
of flowers was upon her shoulder. She looked like
a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles
that were all about her, and the white coifs of
the two nuns that knelt at her feet with their
faces hidden might have been two swans that were
to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or
wherever it is. Leonora showed her to me. She
would not let either of the others see her. She
wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's
feelings. He never could bear the sight of a
corpse. And, since she never gave him an idea
that Maisie had written to her, he imagined that
the death had been the most natural thing in the
world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the
one affair of his about which he never felt much
remorse.

I

THE death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of
August, 1904. And then nothing happened until the
4th of August, 1913. There is the curious
coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether
that is one of those sinister, as if half jocular
and altogether merciless proceedings on the part
of a cruel Providence that we call a coincidence.
Because it may just as well have been the
superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to
certain acts, as if she had been hypnotized. It
is, however, certain that the 4th of August always
proved a significant date for her. To begin with,
she was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that
date, in the year 1899, she set out with her uncle
for the tour round the world in company with a
young man called Jimmy. But that was not merely a
coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the
supposedly damaged heart, was in his delicate way,
offering her, in this trip, a birthday present to
celebrate her coming of age. Then, on the 4th of
August, 1900, she yielded to an action that
certainly coloured her whole life--as well as
mine. She had no luck. She was probably offering
herself a birthday present that morning. . . .

On the 4th of August, 1901, she married me, and
set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind--the
gale that affected her heart. And no doubt there,
again, she was offering herself a birthday
gift--the birthday gift of my miserable life. It
occurs to me that I have never told you anything
about my marriage. That was like this: I have
told you, as I think, that I first met Florence at
the Stuyvesants', in Fourteenth Street. And, from
that moment, I determined with all the obstinacy
of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her
mine, at least to marry her. I had no
occupation--I had no business affairs. I simply
camped down there in Stamford, in a vile hotel,
and just passed my days in the house, or on the
verandah of the Misses Hurlbird. The Misses
Hurlbird, in an odd, obstinate way, did not like
my presence. But they were hampered by the
national manners of these occasions. Florence had
her own sitting-room. She could ask to it whom
she liked, and I simply walked into that
apartment. I was as timid as you will, but in
that matter I was like a chicken that is
determined to get across the road in front of an
automobile. I would walk into Florence's pretty,
little, old-fashioned room, take off my hat, and
sit down.

Florence had, of course, several other fellows,
too--strapping young New Englanders, who worked
during the day in New York and spent only the
evenings in the village of their birth. And, in
the evenings, they would march in on Florence with
almost as much determination as I myself showed.
And I am bound to say that they were received with
as much disfavour as was my portion--from the
Misses Hurlbird. . . .

They were curious old creatures, those two. It
was almost as if they were members of an ancient
family under some curse--they were so
gentlewomanly, so proper, and they sighed so.
Sometimes I would see tears in their eyes. I do
not know that my courtship of Florence made much
progress at first. Perhaps that was because it
took place almost entirely during the daytime, on
hot afternoons, when the clouds of dust hung like
fog, right up as high as the tops of the
thin-leaved elms. The night, I believe, is the
proper season for the gentle feats of love, not a
Connecticut July afternoon, when any sort of
proximity is an almost appalling thought. But, if
I never so much as kissed Florence, she let me
discover very easily, in the course of a
fortnight, her simple wants. And I could supply
those wants. . . .

She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she
wanted a European establishment. She wanted her
husband to have an English accent, an income of
fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate and
no ambitions to increase that income. And--she
faintly hinted--she did not want much physical
passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can
envisage such unions without blinking.

She gave cut this information in floods of
bright talk--she would pop a little bit of it into
comments over a view of the Rialto, Venice, and,
whilst she was brightly describing Balmoral
Castle, she would say that her ideal husband would
he one who could get her received at the British
Court. She had spent, it seemed, two months in
Great Britain--seven weeks in touring from
Stratford to Strathpeffer, and one as paying guest
in an old English family near Ledbury, an
impoverished, but still stately family, called
Bagshawe. They were to have spent two months more
in that tranquil bosom, but inopportune events,
apparently in her uncle's business, had caused
their rather hurried return to Stamford. The
young man called Jimmy had remained in Europe to
perfect his knowledge of that continent. He
certainly did: he was most useful to us
afterwards.

But the point that came out--that there was no
mistaking--was that Florence was coldly and calmly
determined to take no look at any man who could
not give her a European settlement. Her glimpse
of English home life had effected this. She
meant, on her marriage, to have a year in Paris,
and then to have her husband buy some real estate
in the neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, from which
place the Hurlbirds had come in the year 1688. On
the strength of that she was going to take her
place in the ranks of English county society.
That was fixed.

I used to feel mightily elevated when I
considered these details, for I could not figure
out that amongst her acquaintances in Stamford
there was any fellow that would fill the bill.
The most of them were not as wealthy as I, and
those that were were not the type to give up the
fascinations of Wall Street even for the
protracted companionship of Florence. But nothing
really happened during the month of July. On the
1st of August Florence apparently told her aunts
that she intended to marry me.

She had not told me so, but there was no doubt
about the aunts, for, on that afternoon, Miss
Florence Hurlbird, Senior, stopped me on my way to
Florence's sitting-room and took me, agitatedly,
into the parlour. It was a singular interview, in
that old-fashioned colonial room, with the
spindle-legged furniture, the silhouettes, the
miniatures, the portrait of General Braddock, and
the smell of lavender. You see, the two poor
maiden ladies were in agonies--and they could not
say one single thing direct. They would almost
wring their hands and ask if I had considered such
a thing as different temperaments. I assure you
they were almost affectionate, concerned for me
even, as if Florence were too bright for my solid
and serious virtues.

For they had discovered in me solid and serious
virtues. That might have been because I had once
dropped the remark that I preferred General
Braddock to General Washington. For the Hurlbirds
had backed the losing side in the War of
Independence, and had been seriously impoverished
and quite efficiently oppressed for that reason.
The Misses Hurlbird could never forget it.

Nevertheless they shuddered at the thought of a
European career for myself and Florence. Each of
them really wailed when they heard that that was
what I hoped to give their niece. That may have
been partly because they regarded Europe as a sink
of iniquity, where strange laxities prevailed.
They thought the Mother Country as Erastian as any
other. And they carried their protests to
extraordinary lengths, for them. . . .

They even, almost, said that marriage was a
sacrament; but neither Miss Florence nor Miss
Emily could quite bring herself to utter the word.
And they almost brought themselves to say that
Florence's early life had been characterized by
flirtations--something of that sort.

I know I ended the interview by saying:

"I don't care. If Florence has robbed a
bank I am going to marry her and take her to
Europe."

And at that Miss Emily wailed and fainted. But
Miss Florence, in spite of the state of her
sister, threw herself on my neck and cried out:

"Don't do it, John. Don't do it. You're
a good young man," and she added, whilst I
was getting out of the room to send Florenc to her
aunt's rescue:

"We ought to tell you more. But she's our
dear sister's child."

Florence, I remember, received me with a
chalk-pale face and the exclamation:

"Have those old cats been saying anything
against me?" But I assured her that they had
not and hurried her into the room of her strangely
afflicted relatives. I had really forgotten all
about that exclamation of Florence's until this
moment. She treated me so very well--with such
tact--that, if I ever thought of it afterwards I
put it down to her deep affection for me.

And that evening, when I went to fetch her for
a buggy-ride, she had disappeared. I did not lose
any time. I went into New York and engaged berths
on the "Pocahontas", that was to sail on
the evening of the fourth of the month, and then,
returning to Stamford, I tracked out, in the
course of the day, that Florence had been driven
to Rye Station. And there I found that she had
taken the cars to Waterbury. She had, of course,
gone to her uncle's. The old man received me with
a stony, husky face. I was not to see Florence;
she was ill; she was keeping her room. And, from
something that he let drop--an odd Biblical phrase
that I have forgotten --I gathered that all that
family simply did not intend her to marry ever in
her life.

I procured at once the name of the nearest
minister and a rope ladder--you have no idea how
primitively these matters were arranged in those
days in the United States. I daresay that may be
so still. And at one o'clock in the morning of
the 4th of August I was standing in Florence's
bedroom. I was so one-minded in my purpose that
it never struck me there was anything improper in
being, at one o'clock in the morning, in
Florence's bedroom. I just wanted to wake her up.
She was not, however, asleep. She expected me,
and her relatives had only just left her. She
received me with an embrace of a warmth. . . . Well,
it was the first time I had ever been embraced by
a woman--and it was the last when a woman's
embrace has had in it any warmth for me. . . .

I suppose it was my own fault, what followed.
At any rate, I was in such a hurry to get the
wedding over, and was so afraid of her relatives
finding me there, that I must have received her
advances with a certain amount of absence of mind.
I was out of that room and down the ladder in
under half a minute. She kept me waiting at the
foot an unconscionable time--it was certainly
three in the morning before we knocked up that
minister. And I think that that wait was the only
sign Florence ever showed of having a conscience
as far as I was concerned, unless her lying for
some moments in my arms was also a sign of
conscience. I fancy that, if I had shown warmth
then, she would have acted the proper wife to me,
or would have put me back again. But, because I
acted like a Philadelphia gentleman, she made me,
I suppose, go through with the part of a male
nurse. Perhaps she thought that I should not
mind.

After that, as I gather, she had not any more
remorse. She was only anxious to carry out her
plans. For, just before she came down the ladder,
she called me to the top of that grotesque
implement that I went up and down like a tranquil
jumping-jack. I was perfectly collected. She
said to me with a certain fierceness:

"It is determined that we sail at four
this afternoon? You are not lying about having
taken berths?"

I understood that she would naturally be
anxious to get away from the neighbourhood of her
apparently insane relatives, so that I readily
excused her for thinking that I should be capable
of lying about such a thing. I made it,
therefore, plain to her that it was my fixed
determination to sail by the
"Pocahontas". She said then--it was a
moonlit morning, and she was whispering in my ear
whilst I stood on the ladder. The hills that
surround Waterbury showed, extraordinarily
tranquil, around the villa. She said, almost
coldly:

"I wanted to know, so as to pack my
trunks." And she added: "I may be ill,
you know. I guess my heart is a little like Uncle
Hurlbird's. It runs in families."

I whispered that the "Pocahontas" was
an extraordinarily steady boat. . . .

Now I wonder what had passed through Florence's
mind during the two hours that she had kept me
waiting at the foot of the ladder. I would give
not a little to know. Till then, I fancy she had
had no settled plan in her mind. She certainly
never mentioned her heart till that time. Perhaps
the renewed sight of her Uncle Hurlbird had given
her the idea. Certainly her Aunt Emily, who had
come over with her to Waterbury, would have rubbed
into her, for hours and hours, the idea that any
accentuated discussions would kill the old
gentleman. That would recall to her mind all the
safeguards against excitement with which the poor
silly old gentleman had been hedged in during
their trip round the world. That, perhaps, put it
into her head. Still, I believe there was some
remorse on my account, too. Leonora told me that
Florence said there was--for Leonora knew all
about it, and once went so far as to ask her how
she could do a thing so infamous. She excused
herself on the score of an overmastering passion.
Well, I always say that an overmastering passion
is a good excuse for feelings. You cannot help
them. And it is a good excuse for straight
actions--she might have bolted with the fellow,
before or after she married me. And, if they had
not enough money to get along with, they might
have cut their throats, or sponged on her family,
though, of course, Florence wanted such a lot that
it would have suited her very badly to have for a
husband a clerk in a dry-goods store, which was
what old Hurlbird would have made of that fellow.
He hated him. No, I do not think that there is
much excuse for Florence.

God knows. She was a frightened fool, and she
was fantastic, and I suppose that, at that time,
she really cared for that imbecile. He certainly
didn't care for her. Poor thing. . . . At any
rate, after I had assured her that the
"Pocahontas" was a steady ship, she just
said:

"You'll have to look after me in certain
ways--like Uncle Hurlbird is looked after. I will
tell you how to do it." And then she stepped
over the sill, as if she were stepping on board a
boat. I suppose she had burnt hers!

I had, no doubt, eye-openers enough. When we
re-entered the Hurlbird mansion at eight o'clock
the Hurlbirds were just exhausted. Florence had a
hard, triumphant air. We had got married about
four in the morning and had sat about in the woods
above the town till then, listening to a
mocking-bird imitate an old tom-cat. So I guess
Florence had not found getting married to me a very
stimulating process. I had not found anything
much more inspiring to say than how glad I was,
with variations. I think I was too dazed. Well,
the Hurlbirds were too dazed to say much. We had
breakfast together, and then Florence went to pack
her grips and things. Old Hurlbird took the
opportunity to read me a full-blooded lecture, in
the style of an American oration, as to the perils
for young American girlhood lurking in the
European jungle. He said that Paris was full of
snakes in the grass, of which he had had bitter
experience. He concluded, as they always do,
poor, dear old things, with the aspiration that
all American women should one day be
sexless--though that is not the way they put it.
. . .

Well, we made the ship all right by
one-thirty--an there was a tempest blowing. That
helped Florence a good deal. For we were not ten
minutes out from Sandy Hook before Florence went
down into her cabin and her heart took her. An
agitated stewardess came running up to me, and I
went running down. I got my directions how to
behave to my wife. Most of them came from her,
though it was the ship doctor who discreetly
suggested to me that I had better refrain from
manifestations of affection. I was ready enough.

I was, of course, full of remorse. It occurred
to me that her heart was the reason for the
Hurlbirds' mysterious desire to keep their
youngest and dearest unmarried. Of course, they
would be too refined to put the motive into words.
They were old stock New Englanders. They would
not want to have to suggest that a husband must
not kiss the back of his wife's neck. They would
not like to suggest that he might, for the matter
of that. I wonder, though, how Florence got the
doctor to enter the conspiracy--the several
doctors.

Of course her heart squeaked a bit--she had the
same configuration of the lungs as her Uncle
Hurlbird. And, in his company, she must have
heard a great deal of heart talk from
specialists. Anyhow, she and they tied me pretty
well down--and Jimmy, of course, that dreary
boy--what in the world did she see in him? He was
lugubrious, silent, morose. He had no talent as a
painter. He was very sallow and dark, and he
never shaved sufficiently. He met us at Havre,
and he proceeded to make himself useful for the
next two years, during which he lived in our flat
in Paris, whether we were there or not. He
studied painting at Julien's, or some such place.
. . .

That fellow had his hands always in the pockets
of his odious, square-shouldered, broad-hipped,
American coats, and his dark eyes were always full
of ominous appearances. He was, besides, too fat.
Why, I was much the better man. . . .

And I daresay Florence would have given me the
better. She showed signs of it. I think,
perhaps, the enigmatic smile with which she used
to look back at me over her shoulder when she went
into the bathing place was a sort of invitation.
I have mentioned that. It was as if she were
saying: "I am going in here. I am going to
stand so stripped and white and straight--and you
are a man. . . ." Perhaps it was that. .
. .

No, she cannot have liked that fellow long. He
looked like sallow putty. I understand that he
had been slim and dark and very graceful at the
time of her first disgrace. But, loafing about in
Paris, on her pocket-money and on the allowance
that old Hurlbird made him to keep out of the
United States, had given him a stomach like a man
of forty, and dyspeptic irritation on top of it.

God, how they worked me! It was those two
between them who really elaborated the rules. I
have told you something about them--how I had to
head conversations, for all those eleven years,
off such topics as love, poverty, crime, and so
on. But, looking over what I have written, I see
that I have unintentionally misled you when I said
that Florence was never out of my sight. Yet that
was the impression that I really had until just
now. When I come to think of it she was out of my
sight most of the time.

You see, that fellow impressed upon me that
what Florence needed most of all were sleep and
privacy. I must never enter her room without
knocking, or her poor little heart might flutter
away to its doom. He said these things with his
lugubrious croak, and his black eyes like a
crow's, so that I seemed to see poor Florence die
ten times a day--a little, pale, frail corpse.
Why, I would as soon have thought of entering her
room without her permission as of burgling a
church. I would sooner have committed that crime.
I would certainly have done it if I had thought
the state of her heart demanded the sacrilege. So
at ten o'clock at night the door closed upon
Florence, who had gently, and, as if reluctantly,
backed up that fellow's recommendations; and she
would wish me good night as if she were a
cinquecento Italian lady saying good-bye to her
lover. And at ten o'clock of the next morning
there she would come out the door of her room as
fresh as Venus rising from any of the couches that
are mentioned in Greek legends.

Her room door was locked because she was
nervous about thieves; but an electric contrivance
on a cord was understood to be attached to her
little wrist. She had only to press a bulb to
raise the house. And I was provided with an
axe--an axe!--great gods, with which to break down
her door in case she ever failed to answer my
knock, after I knocked really loud several times.
It was pretty well thought out, you see.

What wasn't so well thought out were the
ultimate consequences--our being tied to Europe.
For that young man rubbed it so well into me that
Florence would die if she crossed the Channel--he
impressed it so fully on my mind that, when later
Florence wanted to go to Fordingbridge, I cut the
proposal short--absolutely short, with a curt no.
It fixed her and it frightened her. I was even
backed up by all the doctors. I seemed to have
had endless interviews with doctor after doctor,
cool, quiet men, who would ask, in reasonable
tones, whether there was any reason for our going
to England--any special reason. And since I could
not see any special reason, they would give the
verdict: "Better not, then." I daresay
they were honest enough, as things go. They
probably imagined that the mere associations of
the steamer might have effects on Florence's
nerves. That would be enough, that and a
conscientious desire to keep our money on the
Continent.

It must have rattled poor Florence pretty
considerably, for you see, the main idea--the only
main idea of her heart, that was otherwise
cold--was to get to Fordingbridge and be a county lady
in the home of her ancestors. But Jimmy got her,
there: he shut on her the door of the Channel;
even on the fairest day of blue sky, with the
cliffs of England shining like mother of pearl in
full view of Calais, I would not have let her
cross the steamer gangway to save her life. I
tell you it fixed her.

It fixed her beautifully, because she could not
announce herself as cured, since that would have
put an end to the locked bedroom arrangements.
And, by the time she was sick of Jimmy--which
happened in the year 1903 --she had taken on
Edward Ashburnham. Yes, it was a bad fix for her,
because Edward could have taken her to
Fordingbridge, and, though he could not give her
Branshaw Manor, that home of her ancestors being
settled on his wife, she could at least have
pretty considerably queened it there or
thereabouts, what with our money and the support
of the Ashburnhams. Her uncle, as soon as he
considered that she had really settled down with
me-- and I sent him only the most glowing accounts
of her virtue and constancy --made over to her a
very considerable part of his fortune for which he
had no use. I suppose that we had, between us,
fifteen thousand a year in English money, though I
never quite knew how much of hers went to Jimmy.
At any rate, we could have shone in Fordingbridge.

I never quite knew, either, how she and Edward
got rid of Jimmy. I fancy that fat and
disreputable raven must have had his six golden
front teeth knocked down his throat by Edward one
morning whilst I had gone out to buy some flowers
in the Rue de la Paix, leaving Florence and the
flat in charge of those two. And serve him very
right, is all that I can say. He was a bad sort
of blackmailer; I hope Florence does not have his
company in the next world.

As God is my Judge, I do not believe that I
would have separated those two if I had known that
they really and passionately loved each other. I
do not know where the public morality of the case
comes in, and, of course, no man really knows what
he would have done in any given case. But I truly
believe that I would have united them, observing
ways and means as decent as I could. I believe
that I should have given them money to live upon
and that I should have consoled myself somehow.
At that date I might have found some young thing,
like Maisie Maidan, or the poor girl, and I might
have had some peace. For peace I never had with
Florence, and hardly believe that I cared for her
in the way of love after a year or two of it. She
became for me a rare and fragile object, something
burdensome, but very frail. Why it was as if I
had been given a thin-shelled pullet's egg to
carry on my palm from Equatorial Africa to
Hoboken. Yes, she became for me, as it were, the
subject of a bet--the trophy of an athlete's
achievement, a parsley crown that is the symbol of
his chastity, his soberness, his abstentions, and
of his inflexible will. Of intrinsic value as a
wife, I think she had none at all for me. I fancy
I was not even proud of the way she dressed.

But her passion for Jimmy was not even a
passion, and, mad as the suggestion may appear,
she was frightened for her life. Yes, she was
afraid of me. I will tell you how that happened.

I had, in the old days, a darky servant, called
Julius, who valeted me, and waited on me, and
loved me, like the crown of his head. Now, when
we left Waterbury to go to the
"Pocahontas", Florence entrusted to me
one very special and very precious leather grip.
She told me that her life might depend on that
grip, which contained her drugs against heart
attacks. And, since I was never much of a hand at
carrying things, I entrusted this, in turn, to
Julius, who was a grey-haired chap of sixty or so,
and very picturesque at that. He made so much
impression on Florence that she regarded him as a
sort of father, and absolutely refused to let me
take him to Paris. He would have inconvenienced
her.

Well, Julius was so overcome with grief at
being left behind that he must needs go and drop
the precious grip. I saw red, I saw purple. I
flew at Julius. On the ferry, it was, I filled up
one of his eyes; I threatened to strangle him.
And, since an unresisting negro can make a
deplorable noise and a deplorable spectacle, and,
since that was Florence's first adventure in the
married state, she got a pretty idea of my
character. It affirmed in her the desperate
resolve to conceal from me the fact that she was
not what she would have called "a pure
woman". For that was really the mainspring
of her fantastic actions. She was afraid that I
should murder her. . . .

So she got up the heart attack, at the earliest
possible opportunity, on board the liner. Perhaps
she was not so very much to be blamed. You must
remember that she was a New Englander, and that
New England had not yet come to loathe darkies as
it does now. Whereas, if she had come from even
so little south as Philadelphia, and had been an
oldish family, she would have seen that for me to
kick Julius was not so outrageous an act as for
her cousin, Reggie Hurlbird, to say--as I have
heard him say to his English butler--that for two
cents he would bat him on the pants. Besides, the
medicine-grip did not bulk as largely in her eyes
as it did in mine, where it was the symbol of the
existence of an adored wife of a day. To her it
was just a useful lie. . . .

Well, there you have the position, as clear as
I can make it--the husband an ignorant fool, the
wife a cold sensualist with imbecile fears--for I
was such a fool that I should never have known
what she was or was not--and the blackmailing
lover. And then the other lover came
along. . . .

Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having. Have
I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he
was--the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the
extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious
magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing,
fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have
not conveyed it to you. The truth is, that I
never knew it until the poor girl came along--the
poor girl who was just as straight, as splendid
and as upright as he. I swear she was. I suppose
I ought to have known. I suppose that was,
really, why I liked him so much--so infinitely
much. Come to think of it, I can remember a
thousand little acts of kindliness, of
thoughtfulness for his inferiors, even on the
Continent. Look here, I know of two families of
dirty, unpicturesque, Hessian paupers that that
fellow, with an infinite patience, rooted up, got
their police reports, set on their feet, or
exported to my patient land. And he would do it
quite inarticulately, set in motion by seeing a
child crying in the street. He would wrestle with
dictionaries, in that unfamiliar tongue. . . .
Well, he could not bear to see a child cry.
Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not
give her the comfort of his physical attractions.

But, although I liked him so intensely, I was
rather apt to take these things for granted. They
made me feel comfortable with him, good towards
him; they made me trust him. But I guess I
thought it was part of the character of any
English gentleman. Why, one day he got it into
his head that the head waiter at the Excelsior had
been crying--the fellow with the grey face and
grey whiskers. And then he spent the best part of
a week, in correspondence and up at the British
consul's, in getting the fellow's wife to come
back from London and bring back his girl baby.
She had bolted with a Swiss scullion. If she had
not come inside the week he would have gone to
London himself to fetch her. He was like that.

Edward Ashburnham was like that, and I thought
it was only the duty of his rank and station.
Perhaps that was all that it was--but I pray God
to make me discharge mine as well. And, but for
the poor girl, I daresay that I should never have
seen it, however much the feeling might have been
over me. She had for him such enthusiasm that,
although even now I do not understand the
technicalities of English life, I can gather
enough. She was with them during the whole of our
last stay at Nauheim.

Nancy Rufford was her name; she was Leonora's
only friend's only child, and Leonora was her
guardian, if that is the correct term. She had
lived with the Ashburnhams ever since she had been
of the age of thirteen, when her mother was said
to have committed suicide owing to the brutalities
of her father. Yes, it is a cheerful story. . . .

Edward always called her "the girl",
and it was very pretty, the evident affection he
had for her and she for him. And Leonora's feet
she would have kissed--those two were for her the
best man and the best woman on earth--and in
heaven. I think that she had not a thought of
evil in her head--the poor girl. . . .

Well, anyhow, she chanted Edward's praises to
me for the hour together, but, as I have said, I
could not make much of it. It appeared that he
had the D.S.O., and that his troop loved him
beyond the love of men. You never saw such a
troop as his. And he had the Royal Humane
Society's medal with a clasp. That meant,
apparently, that he had twice jumped off the deck
of a troopship to rescue what the girl called
"Tommies", who had fallen overboard in
the Red Sea and such places. He had been twice
recommended for the V.C., whatever that might
mean, and, although owing to some technicalities
he had never received that apparently coveted
order, he had some special place about his
sovereign at the coronation. Or perhaps it was
some post in the Beefeaters'. She made him out
like a cross between Lohengrin and the Chevalier
Bayard. Perhaps he was. . . . But he was too
silent a fellow to make that side of him really
decorative. I remember going to him at about that
time and asking him what the D.S.O. was, and he
grunted out:

"It's a sort of a thing they give grocers
who've honourably supplied the troops with
adulterated coffee in war-time"--something of
that sort. He did not quite carry conviction to
me, so, in the end, I put it directly to Leonora.
I asked her fully and squarely--prefacing the
question with some remarks, such as those that I
have already given you, as to the difficulty one
has in really getting to know people when one's
intimacy is conducted as an English
acquaintanceship--I asked her whether her husband
was not really a splendid fellow--along at least
the lines of his public functions. She looked at
me with a slightly awakened air--with an air that
would have been almost startled if Leonora could
ever have been startled.

"Didn't you know?" she asked.
"If I come to think of it there is not a more
splendid fellow in any three counties, pick them
where you will--along those lines." And she
added, after she had looked at me reflectively for
what seemed a long time:

"To do my husband justice there could not
be a better man on the earth. There would not be
room for it--along those lines."

"Well," I said, "then he must
really be Lohengrin and the Cid in one body. For
there are not any other lines that
count."

Again she looked at me for a long time.

"It's your opinion that there are no other
lines that count?" she asked slowly.

"Well," I answered gaily,
"you're not going to accuse him of not being
a good husband, or of not being a good guardian to
your ward?"

She spoke then, slowly, like a person who is
listening to the sounds in a sea-shell held to her
ear--and, would you believe it?--she told me
afterwards that, at that speech of mine, for the
first time she had a vague inkling of the tragedy
that was to follow so soon--although the girl had
lived with them for eight years or so:

"Oh, I'm not thinking of saying that he is
not the best of husbands, or that he is not very
fond of the girl."

And then I said something like:

"Well, Leonora, a man sees more of these
things than even a wife. And, let me tell you,
that in all the years I've known Edward he has
never, in your absence, paid a moment's attention
to any other woman--not by the quivering of an
eyelash. I should have noticed. And he talks of
you as if you were one of the angels of
God."

"Oh," she came up to the scratch, as
you could be sure Leonora would always come up to
the scratch, "I am perfectly sure that he
always speaks nicely of me."

I daresay she had practice in that sort of
scene--people must have been always complimenting
her on her husband's fidelity and adoration. For
half the world--the whole of the world that knew
Edward and Leonora believed that his conviction in
the Kilsyte affair had been a miscarriage of
justice--a conspiracy of false evidence, got together by
Nonconformist adversaries. But think of the fool
that I was. . . .

II

LET me think where we were. Oh, yes . . .
that conversation took place on the 4th of August,
1913. I remember saying to her that, on that day,
exactly nine years before, I had made their
acquaintance, so that it had seemed quite
appropriate and like a birthday speech to utter my
little testimonial to my friend Edward. I could
quite confidently say that, though we four had
been about together in all sorts of places, for
all that length of time, I had not, for my part,
one single complaint to make of either of them.
And I added, that that was an unusual record for
people who had been so much together. You are not
to imagine that it was only at Nauheim that we
met. That would not have suited Florence.

I find, on looking at my diaries, that on the
4th of September, 1904, Edward accompanied
Florence and myself to Paris, where we put him up
till the twenty-first of that month. He made
another short visit to us in December of that
year--the first year of our acquaintance. It must
have been during this visit that he knocked Mr
Jimmy's teeth down his throat. I daresay Florence
had asked him to come over for that purpose. In
1905 he was in Paris three times--once with
Leonora, who wanted some frocks. In 1906 we spent
the best part of six weeks together at Mentone,
and Edward stayed with us in Paris on his way back
to London. That was how it went.

The fact was that in Florence the poor wretch
had got hold of a Tartar, compared with whom
Leonora was a sucking kid. He must have had a
hell of a time. Leonora wanted to keep him
for--what shall I say--for the good of her church,
as it were, to show that Catholic women do not
lose their men. Let it go at that, for the
moment. I will write more about her motives
later, perhaps. But Florence was sticking on to
the proprietor of the home of her ancestors. No
doubt he was also a very passionate lover. But I
am convinced that he was sick of Florence within
three years of even interrupted companionship and
the life that she led him. . . .

If ever Leonora so much as mentioned in a
letter that they had had a woman staying with
them--or, if she so much as mentioned a woman's
name in a letter to me--off would go a desperate
cable in cipher to that poor wretch at Branshaw,
commanding him on pain of an instant and horrible
disclosure to come over and assure her of his
fidelity. I daresay he would have faced it out; I
daresay he would have thrown over Florence and
taken the risk of exposure. But there he had
Leonora to deal with. And Leonora assured him
that, if the minutest fragment of the real
situation ever got through to my senses, she would
wreak upon him the most terrible vengeance that
she could think of. And he did not have a very
easy job. Florence called for more and more
attentions from him as the time went on. She
would make him kiss her at any moment of the day;
and it was only by his making it plain that a
divorced lady could never assume a position in the
county of Hampshire that he could prevent her from
making a bolt of it with him in her train. Oh,
yes, it was a difficult job for him.

For Florence, if you please, gaining in time a
more composed view of nature, and overcome by her
habits of garrulity, arrived at a frame of mind in
which she found it almost necessary to tell me all
about it--nothing less than that. She said that
her situation was too unbearable with regard to
me.

She proposed to tell me all, secure a divorce
from me, and go with Edward and settle in
California. . . . I do not suppose that she was
really serious in this. It would have meant the
extinction of all hopes of Branshaw Manor for her.
Besides she had got it into her head that Leonora,
who was as sound as a roach, was consumptive. She
was always begging Leonora, before me, to go and
see a doctor. But, none the less, poor Edward
seems to have believed in her determination to
carry him off. He would not have gone; he cared
for his wife too much. But, if Florence had put
him at it, that would have meant my getting to
know of it, and his incurring Leonora's vengeance.
And she could have made it pretty hot for him in
ten or a dozen different ways. And she assured me
that she would have used every one of them. She
was determined to spare my feelings. And she was
quite aware that, at that date, the hottest she
could have made it for him would have been to
refuse, herself, ever to see him again. . . .

Well, I think I have made it pretty clear. Let
me come to the 4th of August, 1913, the last day
of my absolute ignorance--and, I assure you, of my
perfect happiness. For the coming of that dear
girl only added to it all.

On that 4th of August I was sitting in the
lounge with a rather odious Englishman called
Bagshawe, who had arrived that night, too late for
dinner. Leonora had just gone to bed and I was
waiting for Florence and Edward and the girl to
come back from a concert at the Casino. They had
not gone there all together. Florence, I
remember, had said at first that she would remain
with Leonora, and me, and Edward and the girl had
gone off alone. And then Leonora had said to
Florence with perfect calmness:

"I wish you would go with those two. I
think the girl ought to have the appearance of
being chaperoned with Edward in these places. I
think the time has come." So Florence, with
her light step, had slipped out after them. She
was all in black for some cousin or other.
Americans are particular in those matters.

We had gone on sitting in the lounge till
towards ten, when Leonora had gone up to bed. It
had been a very hot day, but there it was cool.
The man called Bagshawe had been reading
The Times
on the other side of the room, but then he moved
over to me with some trifling question as a
prelude to suggesting an acquaintance. I fancy he
asked me something About the poll-tax on
Kur-guests, and whether it could not be sneaked
out of. He was that sort of person.

Well, he was an unmistakable man, with a
military figure, rather exaggerated, with bulbous
eyes that avoided your own, and a pallid
complexion that suggested vices practised in
secret along with an uneasy desire for making
acquaintance at whatever cost. . . . The
filthy toad.
. . .

He began by telling me that he came from Ludlow
Manor, near Ledbury. The name had a slightly
familiar sound, though I could not fix it in my
mind. Then he began to talk about a duty on hops,
about Californian hops, about Los Angeles, where
he had been. He fencing for a topic with which he
might gain my affection.

And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light
of the street, I saw Florence running. It was
like that--I saw Florence running with a face whiter than
paper and her hand on the black stuff over her
heart. I tell you, my own heart stood still; I
tell you I could not move. She rushed in at the
swing doors. She looked round that place of rush
chairs, cane tables and newspapers. She saw me
and opened her lips. She saw the man who was
talking to me. She stuck her hands over her face
as if she wished to push her eyes out. And she
was not there any more.

I could not move; I could not stir a finger.
And then that man said:

"By Jove: Florry Hurlbird." He turned
upon me with an oily and uneasy sound meant for a
laugh. He was really going to ingratiate himself
with me.

"Do you know who that is?" he asked.
"The last time I saw that girl she was coming
out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at
five o'clock in the morning. In my house at
Ledbury. You saw her recognize me." He was
standing on his feet, looking down at me. I don't
know what I looked like. At any rate, he gave a
sort of gurgle and then stuttered:

"Oh, I say. . . ." Those were the
last words I ever heard of Mr Bagshawe's. A long
time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge
and went up to Florence's room. She had not
locked the door--for the first time of our married
life. She was lying, quite respectably arranged,
unlike Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little
phial that rightly should have contained nitrate
of amyl, in her right hand. That was on the 4th
of August, 1913.

I

THE odd thing is that what sticks out in my
recollection of the rest of that evening was
Leonora's saying:

"Of course you might marry her," and,
when I asked whom, she answered:

"The girl."

Now that is to me a very amazing thing--amazing
for the light of possibilities that it casts into
the human heart. For I had never had the
slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I
never had the slightest idea even of caring for
her. I must have talked in an odd way, as people
do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is
as if one had a dual personality, the one I being
entirely unconscious of the other. I had thought
nothing; I had said such an extraordinary thing.

I don't know that analysis of my own psychology
matters at all to this story. I should say that
it didn't or, at any rate, that I had given enough
of it. But that odd remark of mine had a strong
influence upon what came after. I mean, that
Leonora would probably never have spoken to me at
all about Florence's relations with Edward if I
hadn't said, two hours after my wife's death:

"Now I can marry the girl."

She had, then, taken it for granted that I had
been suffering all that she had been suffering,
or, at least, that I had permitted all that she
had permitted. So that, a month ago, about a week
after the funeral of poor Edward, she could say to
me in the most natural way in the world--I had
been talking about the duration of my stay at
Branshaw--she said with her clear, reflective
intonation:

"Oh, stop here for ever and ever if you
can." And then she added, "You couldn't
be more of a brother to me, or more of a
counsellor, or more of a support. You are all the
consolation I have in the world. And isn't it odd
to think that if your wife hadn't been my
husband's mistress, you would probably never have
been here at all?"

That was how I got the news--full in the face,
like that. I didn't say anything and I don't
suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was with
that mysterious and unconscious self that
underlies most people. Perhaps one day when I am
unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and
spit upon poor Edward's grave. It seems about the
most unlikely thing I could do; but there it is.

No, I remember no emotion of any sort, but just
the clear feeling that one has from time to time
when one hears that some Mrs So-and-So is
au mieux
with a certain gentleman. It made things plainer,
suddenly, to my curiosity. It was as if I
thought, at that moment, of a windy November
evening, that, when I came to think it over
afterwards, a dozen unexplained things would fit
themselves into place. But I wasn't thinking
things over then. I remember that distinctly. I
was just sitting back, rather stiffly, in a deep
arm-chair. That is what I remember. It was
twilight.

Branshaw Manor lies in a little hollow with
lawns across it and pine-woods on the fringe of
the dip. The immense wind, coming from across the
forest, roared overhead. But the view from the
window was perfectly quiet and grey. Not a thing
stirred, except a couple of rabbits on the extreme
edge of the lawn. It was Leonora's own little
study that we were in and we were waiting for the
tea to be brought. I, as I said, was sitting in
the deep chair, Leonora was standing in the window
twirling the wooden acorn at the end of the
window-blind cord desultorily round and round.
She looked across the lawn and said, as far as I
can remember:

"Edward has been dead only ten days and
yet there are rabbits on the lawn."

I understand that rabbits do a great deal of
harm to the short grass in England. And then she
turned round to me and said without any adornment
at all, for I remember her exact words:

"I think it was stupid of Florence to
commit suicide."

I cannot tell you the extraordinary sense of
leisure that we two seemed to have at that moment.
It wasn't as if we were waiting for a train, it
wasn't as if we were waiting for a meal--it was
just that there was nothing to wait for. Nothing.

There was an extreme stillness with the remote
and intermittent sound of the wind. There was the
grey light in that brown, small room. And there
appeared to be nothing else in the world. I knew
then that Leonora was about to let me into her
full confidence. It was as if--or no, it was the
actual fact that--Leonora with an odd English
sense of decency had determined to wait until
Edward had been in his grave for a full week
before she spoke. And with some vague motive of
giving her an idea of the extent to which she must
permit herself to make confidences, I said slowly
--and these words too I remember with
exactitude--"Did Florence commit suicide? I
didn't know."

I was just, you understand, trying to let her
know that, if she were going to speak she would
have to talk about a much wider range of things
than she had before thought necessary.

So that that was the first knowledge I had that
Florence had committed suicide. It had never
entered my head. You may think that I had been
singularly lacking in suspiciousness; you may
consider me even to have been an imbecile. But
consider the position.

In such circumstances of clamour, of outcry, of
the crash of many people running together, of the
professional reticence of such people as
hotel-keepers, the traditional reticence of such
"good people" as the Ashburnhams--in
such circumstances it is some little material
object, always, that catches the eye and that
appeals to the imagination. I had no possible
guide to the idea of suicide and the sight of the
little flask of nitrate of amyl in Florence's hand
suggested instantly to my mind the idea of the
failure of her heart. Nitrate of amyl, you
understand, is the drug that is given to relieve
sufferers from angina pectoris.

Seeing Florence, as I had seen her, running
with a white face and with one hand held over her
heart, and seeing her, as I immediately afterwards
saw her, lying upon her bed with the so familiar
little brown flask clenched in her fingers, it was
natural enough for my mind to frame the idea. As
happened now and again, I thought, she had gone
out without her remedy and, having felt an attack
coming on whilst she was in the gardens, she had
run in to get the nitrate in order, as quickly as
possible, to obtain relief. And it was equally
inevitable my mind should frame the thought that
her heart, unable to stand the strain of the
running, should have broken in her side. How
could I have known that, during all the years of
our married life, that little brown flask had
contained, not nitrate of amyl, but prussic acid?
It was inconceivable.

Why, not even Edward Ashburnham, who was, after
all more intimate with her than I was, had an
inkling of the truth. He just thought that she
had dropped dead of heart disease. Indeed, I
fancy that the only people who ever knew that
Florence had committed suicide were Leonora, the
Grand Duke, the head of the police and the
hotel-keeper. I mention these last three because
my recollection of that night is only the sort of
pinkish effulgence from the electric-lamps in the
hotel lounge. There seemed to bob into my
consciousness, like floating globes, the faces of
those three. Now it would be the bearded,
monarchical, benevolent head of the Grand Duke;
then the sharp-featured, brown, cavalry-moustached
feature of the chief of police; then the globular,
polished and high-collared vacuousness that
represented Monsieur Schontz, the proprietor of
the hotel. At times one head would be there
alone, at another the spiked helmet of the
official would be close to the healthy baldness of
the prince; then M. Schontz's oiled locks would
push in between the two. The sovereign's soft,
exquisitely trained voice would say, "Ja, ja,
ja!" each word dropping out like so many soft
pellets of suet; the subdued rasp of the official
would come: "Zum Befehl Durchlaucht,"
like five revolver-shots; the voice of M. Schontz
would go on and on under its breath like that of
an unclean priest reciting from his breviary in
the corner of a railway-carriage. That was how it
presented itself to me.

They seemed to take no notice of me; I don't
suppose that I was even addressed by one of them.
But, as long as one or the other, or all three of
them were there, they stood between me as if, I
being the titular possessor of the corpse, had a
right to be present at their conferences. Then
they all went away and I was left alone for a long
time.

And I thought nothing; absolutely nothing. I
had no ideas; I had no strength. I felt no
sorrow, no desire for action, no inclination to go
upstairs and fall upon the body of my wife. I
just saw the pink effulgence, the cane tables, the
palms, the globular match-holders, the indented
ash-trays. And then Leonora came to me and it
appears that I addressed to her that singular
remark:

"Now I can marry the girl."

But I have given you absolutely the whole of my
recollection of that evening, as it is the whole
of my recollection of the succeeding three or four
days. I was in a state just simply cataleptic.
They put me to bed and I stayed there; they
brought me my clothes and I dressed; they led me
to an open grave and I stood beside it. If they
had taken me to the edge of a river, or if they
had flung me beneath a railway train, I should
have been drowned or mangled in the same spirit.
I was the walking dead.

Well, those are my impressions.

What had actually happened had been this. I
pieced it together afterwards. You will remember
I said that Edward Ashburnham and the girl had
gone off, that night, to a concert at the Casino
and that Leonora had asked Florence, almost
immediately after their departure, to follow them
and to perform the office of chaperone. Florence,
you may also remember, was all in black, being the
mourning that she wore for a deceased cousin, Jean
Hurlbird. It was a very black night and the girl
was dressed in cream-coloured muslin, that must
have glimmered under the tall trees of the dark
park like a phosphorescent fish in a cupboard.
You couldn't have had a better beacon.

And it appears that Edward Ashburnham led the
girl not up the straight allée that leads
to the Casino, but in under the dark trees of the
park. Edward Ashburnham told me all this in his
final outburst. I have told you that, upon that
occasion, he became deucedly vocal. I didn't pump
him. I hadn't any motive. At that time I didn't
in the least connect him with my wife. But the
fellow talked like a cheap novelist.--Or like a
very good novelist for the matter of that, if it's
the business of a novelist to make you see things
clearly. And I tell you I see that thing as
clearly as if it were a dream that never left me.
It appears that, not very far from the Casino, he
and the girl sat down in the darkness upon a
public bench. The lights from that place of
entertainment must have reached them through the
tree-trunks, since, Edward said, he could quite
plainly see the girl's face--that beloved face
with the high forehead, the queer mouth, the
tortured eyebrows, and the direct eyes. And to
Florence, creeping up behind them, they must have
presented the appearance of silhouettes. For I
take it that Florence came creeping up behind them
over the short grass to a tree that, I quite well
remember, was immediately behind that public seat.
It was not a very difficult feat for a woman
instinct with jealousy. The Casino orchestra was,
as Edward remembered to tell me, playing the
Rakocsy march, and although it was not loud
enough, at that distance, to drown the voice of
Edward Ashburnham it was certainly sufficiently
audible to efface, amongst the noises of the
night, the slight brushings and rustlings that
might have been made by the feet of Florence or by
her gown in coming over the short grass. And that
miserable woman must have got it in the face, good
and strong. It must have been horrible for her.
Horrible! Well, I suppose she deserved all that
she got.

Anyhow, there you have the picture, the
immensely tall trees, elms most of them, towering
and feathering away up into the black mistiness
that trees seem to gather about them at night; the
silhouettes of those two upon the seat; the beams
of light coming from the Casino, the woman all in
black peeping with fear behind the tree-trunk. It
is melodrama; but I can't help it.

And then, it appears, something happened to
Edward Ashburnham. He assured me--and I see no
reason for disbelieving him--that until that
moment he had had no idea whatever of caring for
the girl. He said that he had regarded her
exactly as he would have regarded a daughter. He
certainly loved her, but with a very deep, very
tender and very tranquil love. He had missed her
when she went away to her convent-school; he had
been glad when she had returned. But of more than
that he had been totally unconscious. Had he been
conscious of it, he assured me, he would have fled
from it as from a thing accursed. He realized
that it was the last outrage upon Leonora. But
the real point was his entire unconsciousness. He
had gone with her into that dark park with no
quickening of the pulse, with no desire for the
intimacy of solitude. He had gone, intending to
talk about polo-ponies, and tennis-racquets; about
the temperament of the reverend Mother at the
convent she had left and about whether her frock
for a party when they got home should be white or
blue. It hadn't come into his head that they
would talk about a single thing that they hadn't
always talked about; it had not even come into his
head that the tabu which extended around her was
not inviolable. And then, suddenly, that--

He was
very careful to assure me that at that time there
was no physical motive about his declaration. It
did not appear to him to be a matter of a dark
night and a propinquity and so on. No, it was
simply of her effect on the moral side of his life
that he appears to have talked. He said that he
never had the slightest notion to enfold her in
his arms or so much as to touch her hand. He
swore that he did not touch her hand. He said
that they sat, she at one end of the bench, he at
the other; he leaning slightly towards her and she
looking straight towards the light of the Casino,
her face illuminated by the lamps. The expression
upon her face he
could only describe as "queer". At
another time, indeed, he made it appear that he
thought she was glad. It is easy to imagine that
she was glad, since at that time she could have
had no idea of what was really happening.
Frankly, she adored Edward Ashburnham. He was for
her, in everything that she said at that time, the
model of humanity, the hero, the athlete, the
father of his country, the law-giver. So that for
her, to be suddenly, intimately and overwhelmingly
praised must have been a matter for mere gladness,
however overwhelming it were. It must have been
as if a god had approved her handiwork or a king
her loyalty. She just sat still and listened,
smiling. And it seemed to her that all the
bitterness of her childhood, the terrors of her
tempestuous father, the bewailings of her
cruel-tongued mother were suddenly atoned for.
She had her recompense at last. Because, of
course, if you come to figure it out, a sudden
pouring forth of passion by a man whom you regard
as a cross between a pastor and a father might, to
a woman, have the aspect of mere praise for good
conduct. It wouldn't, I mean, appear at all in
the light of an attempt to gain possession. The
girl, at least, regarded him as firmly anchored to
his Leonora. She had not the slightest inkling of
any infidelities. He had always spoken to her of
his wife in terms of reverence and deep affection.
He had given her the idea that he regarded Leonora
as absolutely impeccable and as absolutely
satisfying. Their union had appeared to her to be
one of those blessed things that are spoken of and
contemplated with reverence by her church.

So that, when he spoke of her as being the
person he cared most for in the world, she
naturally thought that he meant to except Leonora
and she was just glad. It was like a father
saying that he approved of a marriageable daughter
. . . And Edward, when he realized what he was doing,
curbed his tongue at once. She was just glad and
she went on being just glad.

I suppose that that was the most monstrously
wicked thing that Edward Ashburnham ever did in
his life. And yet I am so near to all these
people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It
is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham
as anything but straight, upright and honourable.
That, I mean, is, in spite of everything, my
permanent view of him. I try at times by dwelling
on some of the things that he did to push that
image of him away, as you might try to push aside
a large pendulum. But it always comes back--the
memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of his
efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such
a fine fellow.

So I feel myself forced to attempt to excuse
him in this as in so many other things. It is, I
have no doubt, a most monstrous thing to attempt
to corrupt a young girl just out of a convent.
But I think Edward had no idea at all of
corrupting her. I believe that he simply loved
her. He said that that was the way of it and I,
at least, believe him and I believe too that she
was the only woman he ever really loved. He said
that that was so; and he did enough to prove it.
And Leonora said that it was so and Leonora knew
him to the bottom of his heart.

I have come to be very much of a cynic in these
matters; I mean that it is impossible to believe
in the permanence of man's or woman's love. Or,
at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the
permanence of any early passion. As I see it, at
least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love
for any definite woman--is something in the nature
of a widening of the experience. With each new
woman that a man is attracted to there appears to
come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like,
an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the
eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer
characteristic gesture--all these things, and it
is these things that cause to arise the passion of
love--all these things are like so many objects on
the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to
walk beyond the horizon, to explore. He wants to
get, as it were, behind those eyebrows with the
peculiar turn, as if he desired to see the world
with the eyes that they overshadow. He wants to
hear that voice applying itself to every possible
proposition, to every possible topic; he wants to
see those characteristic gestures against every
possible background. Of the question of the
sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think
that it counts for very much in a really great
passion. It can be aroused by such nothings--by
an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in
passing-- that I think it might be left out of the
calculation. I don't mean to say that any great
passion can exist without a desire for
consummation. That seems to me to be a
commonplace and to be therefore a matter needing
no comment at all. It is a thing, with all its
accidents, that must be taken for granted, as, in
a novel, or a biography, you take it for granted
that the characters have their meals with some
regularity. But the real fierceness of desire,
the real heat of a passion long continued and
withering up the soul of a man is the craving for
identity with the woman that he loves. He desires
to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same
sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to
lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be
supported. For, whatever may be said of the
relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a
woman that does not desire to come to her for the
renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of
his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring
of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we
are all so alone, we all so need from the outside
the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

So, for a time, if such a passion come to
fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will
get the moral support, the encouragement, the
relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance
of his own worth. But these things pass away;
inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass
across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The
pages of the book will become familiar; the
beautiful corner of the road will have been turned
too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

And yet I do believe that for every man there
comes at last a woman--or no, that is the wrong
way of formulating it. For every man there comes
at last a time of life when the woman who then
sets her seal upon his imagination has set her
seal for good. He will travel over no more
horizons; he will never again set the knapsack
over his shoulders; he will retire from those
scenes. He will have gone out of the business.

That at any rate was the case with Edward and
the poor girl. It was quite literally the case.
It was quite literally the case that his
passions--for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for
Mrs Basil, for little Mrs Maidan, for Florence,
for whom you will--these passions were merely
preliminary canters compared to his final race
with death for her. I am certain of that. I am
not going to be so American as to say that all
true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't.
But I think that love will be truer and more
permanent in which self-sacrifice has been
exacted. And, in the case of the other women,
Edward just cut in and cut them out as he did with
the polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron
von Lelöffel. I don't mean to say that he
didn't wear himself as thin as a lath in the
endeavour to capture the other women; but over her
he wore himself to rags and tatters and death--in
the effort to leave her alone.

And, in speaking to her on that night, he
wasn't, I am convinced, committing a baseness. It
was as if his passion for her hadn't existed; as
if the very words that he spoke, without knowing
that he spoke them, created the passion as they
went along. Before he spoke, there was nothing;
afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life.
Well, I must get back to my story.

And my story was concerning itself with
Florence--with Florence, who heard those words
from behind the tree. That of course is only
conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty
well justified. You have the fact that those two
went out, that she followed them almost
immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a
little later, she came running back to the hotel
with that pallid face and the hand clutching her
dress over her heart. It can't have been only
Bagshawe. Her face was contorted with agony
before ever her eyes fell upon me or upon him
beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been
the determining influence in her suicide. Leonora
says that she had that flask, apparently of
nitrate of amyl, but actually of prussic acid, for
many years and that she was determined to use it
if ever I discovered the nature of her
relationship with that fellow
Jimmy. You see, the mainspring of her nature must
have been vanity. There is no reason why it
shouldn't have been; I guess it is vanity that
makes most of us keep straight, if we do keep
straight, in this world.

If it had been merely a matter of Edward's
relations with the girl I dare say Florence would
have faced it out. She would no doubt have made
him scenes, have threatened him, have appealed to
his sense of humour, to his promises. But Mr
Bagshawe and the fact that the date was the 4th of
August must have been too much for her
superstitious mind. You see, she had two things
that she wanted. She wanted to be a great lady,
installed in Branshaw Teleragh. She wanted also
to retain my respect.

She wanted, that is to say, to retain my
respect for as long as she lived with me. I
suppose, if she had persuaded Edward Ashburnham to
bolt with her she would have let the whole thing
go with a run. Or perhaps she would have tried to
exact from me a new respect for the greatness of
her passion on the lines of all for love and the
world well lost. That would be just like
Florence.

In all matrimonial associations there is, I
believe, one constant factor --a desire to deceive
the person with whom one lives as to some weak
spot in one's character or in one's career. For
it is intolerable to live constantly with one
human being who perceives one's small meannesses.
It is really death to do so--that is why so many
marriages turn out unhappily.

I, for instance, am a rather greedy man; I have
a taste for good cookery and a watering tooth at
the mere sound of the names of certain
comestibles. If Florence had discovered this
secret of mine I should have found her knowledge
of it so unbearable that I never could have
supported all the other privations of the
régime that she extracted from me. I am
bound to say that Florence never discovered this
secret.

Certainly she never alluded to it; I dare say
she never took sufficient interest in me.

And the secret weakness of Florence--the
weakness that she could not bear to have me
discover, was just that early escapade with the
fellow called Jimmy. Let me, as this is in all
probability the last time I shall mention
Florence's name, dwell a little upon the change
that had taken place in her psychology. She would
not, I mean, have minded if I had discovered that
she was the mistress of Edward Ashburnham. She
would rather have liked it. Indeed, the chief
trouble of poor Leonora in those days was to keep
Florence from making, before me, theatrical
displays, on one line or another, of that very
fact. She wanted, in one mood, to come rushing to
me, to cast herself on her knees at my feet and to
declaim a carefully arranged, frightfully
emotional, outpouring as to her passion. That was
to show that she was like one of the great erotic
women of whom history tells us. In another mood
she would desire to come to me disdainfully and to
tell me that I was considerably less than a man
and that what had happened was what must happen
when a real male came along. She wanted to say
that in cool, balanced and sarcastic sentences.
That was when she wished to appear like the
heroine of a French comedy. Because of course she
was always play acting.

But what she didn't want me to know was the
fact of her first escapade with the fellow called
Jimmy. She had arrived at figuring out the sort
of low-down Bowery tough that that fellow was. Do
you know what it is to shudder, in later life, for
some small, stupid action--usually for some small,
quite genuine piece of emotionalism--of your early
life? Well, it was that sort of shuddering that
came over Florence at the thought that she had
surrendered to such a low fellow. I don't know
that she need have shuddered. It was her footing
old uncle's work; he ought never to have taken
those two round the world together and shut
himself up in
his cabin for the greater part of the time.
Anyhow, I am convinced that the sight of Mr
Bagshawe and the thought that Mr Bagshawe--for she
knew that unpleasant and toadlike personality--the
thought that Mr Bagshawe would almost certainly
reveal to me that he had caught her coming out of
Jimmy's bedroom at five o'clock in the morning on
the 4th of August, 1900--that was the determining
influence in her suicide. And no doubt the effect
of the date was too much for her superstitious
personality. She had been born on the 4th of
August; she had started to go round the world on
the 4th of August; she had become a low fellow's
mistress on the 4th of August. On the same day of
the year she had married me; on that 4th she had
lost Edward's love, and Bagshawe had appeared like
a sinister omen--like a grin on the face of Fate.
It was the last straw. She ran upstairs, arranged
herself decoratively upon her bed--she was a
sweetly pretty woman with smooth pink and white
cheeks, long hair, the eyelashes falling like a
tiny curtain on her cheeks. She drank the little
phial of prussic acid and there she lay.--Oh,
extremely charming and clear-cut--looking with a
puzzled expression at the electric-light bulb that
hung from the ceiling, or perhaps through it, to
the stars above. Who knows? Anyhow, there was an
end of Florence.

You have no idea how quite extraordinarily for
me that was the end of Florence. From that day to
this I have never given her another thought; I
have not bestowed upon her so much as a sigh. Of
course, when it has been necessary to talk about
her to Leonora, or when for the purpose of these
writings I have tried to figure her out, I have
thought about her as I might do about a problem in
algebra. But it has always been as a matter for
study, not for remembrance. She just went
completely out of existence, like yesterday's
paper.

I was so deadly tired. And I dare say that my
week or ten days of affaissement--of what was
practically catalepsy--was just the repose that my
exhausted nature claimed after twelve years of the
repression of my instincts, after twelve years of
playing the trained poodle. For that was all that
I had been. I suppose that it was the shock that
did it--the several shocks. But I am unwilling to
attribute my feelings at that time to anything so
concrete as a shock. It was a feeling so
tranquil. It was as if an immensely heavy--an
unbearably heavy knapsack, supported upon my
shoulders by straps, had fallen off and left my
shoulders themselves that the straps had cut into,
numb and without sensation of life. I tell you, I
had no regret. What had I to regret? I suppose
that my inner soul--my dual personality--had
realized long before that Florence was a
personality of paper--that she represented a real
human being with a heart, with feelings, with
sympathies and with emotions only as a bank-note
represents a certain quantity of gold. I know
that sort of feeling came to the surface in me the
moment the man Bagshawe told me that he had seen
her coming out of that fellow's bedroom. I
thought suddenly that she wasn't real; she was
just a mass of talk out of guidebooks, of drawings
out of fashion-plates. It is even possible that,
if that feeling had not possessed me, I should
have run up sooner to her room and might have
prevented her drinking the prussic acid. But I
just couldn't do it; it would have been like
chasing a scrap of paper--an occupation ignoble
for a grown man.

And, as it began, so that matter has remained.
I didn't care whether she had come out of that
bedroom or whether she hadn't. It simply didn't
interest me. Florence didn't matter.

I suppose you will retort that I was in love
with Nancy Rufford and that my indifference was
therefore discreditable. Well, I am not seeking
to avoid discredit. I was in love with Nancy
Rufford as I am in love with the poor child's
memory, quietly and quite tenderly in my American
sort of way. I had never thought about it until I
heard Leonora state that I might now marry her.
But, from that moment until her worse than death,
I do not suppose that I much thought about
anything else. I don't mean to say that I sighed
about her or groaned; I just wanted to marry her
as some people want to go to Carcassonne.

Do you understand the feeling--the sort of
feeling that you must get certain matters out of
the way, smooth out certain fairly negligible
complications before you can go to a place that
has, during all your life, been a sort of dream
city? I didn't attach much importance to my
superior years. I was forty-five, and she, poor
thing, was only just rising twenty-two. But she
was older than her years and quieter. She seemed
to have an odd quality of sainthood, as if she
must inevitably end in a convent with a white coif
framing her face. But she had frequently told me
that she had no vocation; it just simply wasn't
there--the desire to become a nun. Well, I guess
that I was a sort of convent myself; it seemed
fairly proper that she should make her vows to me.

No, I didn't see any impediment on the score of
age. I dare say no man does and I was pretty
confident that with a little preparation, I could
make a young girl happy. I could spoil her as few
young girls have ever been spoiled; and I couldn't
regard myself as personally repulsive. No man
can, or if he ever comes to do so, that is the end
of him. But, as soon as I came out of my
catalepsy, I seemed to perceive that my
problem--that what I had to do to prepare myself
for getting into contact with her, was just to get
back into contact with life. I had been kept for
twelve years in a rarefied atmosphere; what I then
had to do was a little fighting with real life,
some wrestling with men of business, some
travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh,
something masculine. I didn't want to present
myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old maid.
That was why, just a fortnight after Florence's
suicide, I set off for the United States.

II

IMMEDIATELY after Florence's death Leonora
began to put the leash upon Nancy Rufford and
Edward. She had guessed what had happened under
the trees near the Casino. They stayed at Nauheim
some weeks after I went, and Leonora has told me
that that was the most deadly time of her
existence. It seemed like a long, silent duel
with invisible weapons, so she said. And it was
rendered all the more difficult by the girl's
entire innocence. For Nancy was always trying to
go off alone with Edward--as she had been doing
all her life, whenever she was home for holidays.
She just wanted him to say nice things to her
again.

You see, the position was extremely
complicated. It was as complicated as it well
could be, along delicate lines. There was the
complication caused by the fact that Edward and
Leonora never spoke to each other except when
other people were present. Then, as I have said,
their demeanours were quite perfect. There was
the complication caused by the girl's entire
innocence; there was the further complication that
both Edward and Leonora really regarded the girl
as their daughter. Or it might be more precise to
say that they regarded her as being Leonora's
daughter. And Nancy was a queer girl; it is very
difficult to describe her to you.

She was tall and strikingly thin; she had a
tortured mouth, agonized eyes, and a quite
extraordinary sense of fun. You, might put it
that at times she was exceedingly grotesque and at
times extraordinarily beautiful. Why, she had the
heaviest head of black hair that I have ever come
across; I used to wonder how she could bear the
weight of it. She was just over twenty-one and at
times she seemed as old as the hills, at times not
much more than sixteen. At one moment she would
be talking of the lives of the saints and at the
next she would be tumbling all over the lawn with
the St Bernard puppy. She could ride to hounds
like a Maenad and she could sit for hours
perfectly still, steeping handkerchief after
handkerchief in vinegar when Leonora had one of
her headaches. She was, in short, a miracle of
patience who could be almost miraculously
impatient. It was, no doubt, the convent training
that effected that. I remember that one of her
letters to me, when she was about sixteen, ran
something like:

"On Corpus Christi"--or it may have
been some other saint's day, I cannot keep these
things in my head--"our school played
Roehampton at Hockey. And, seeing that our side
was losing, being three goals to one against us at
halftime, we retired into the chapel and prayed
for victory. We won by five goals to three."
And I remember that she seemed to describe
afterwards a sort of saturnalia. Apparently, when
the victorious fifteen or eleven came into the
refectory for supper, the whole school jumped upon
the tables and cheered and broke the chairs on the
floor and smashed the crockery--for a given time,
until the Reverend Mother rang a hand-bell. That
is of course the Catholic tradition--saturnalia
that can end in a moment, like the crack of a
whip. I don't, of course, like the tradition, but
I am bound to say that it gave Nancy--or at any
rate Nancy had--a sense of rectitude that I have
never seen surpassed. It was a thing like a knife
that looked out of her eyes and that spoke with
her voice, just now and then. It positively
frightened me. I suppose that I was almost afraid
to be in a world where there could be so fine a
standard. I remember when she was about fifteen
or sixteen on going back to the convent I once
gave her a couple of English sovereigns as a tip.
She thanked me in a peculiarly heartfelt way,
saying that it would come in extremely handy. I
asked her why and she explained. There was a rule
at the school that the pupils were not to speak
when they walked through the garden from the
chapel to the refectory. And, since this rule
appeared to be idiotic and arbitrary, she broke it
on purpose day after day. In the evening the
children were all asked if they had committed any
faults during the day, and every evening Nancy
confessed that she had broken this particular
rule. It cost her sixpence a time, that being the
fine attached to the offence. Just for the
information I asked her why she always confessed,
and she answered in these exact words:

"Oh, well, the girls of the Holy Child
have always been noted for their truthfulness.
It's a beastly bore, but I've got to do
it."

I dare say that the miserable nature of her
childhood, coming before the mixture of saturnalia
and discipline that was her convent life, added
something to her queernesses. Her father was a
violent madman of a fellow, a major of one of what
I believe are called the Highland regiments. He
didn't drink, but he had an ungovernable temper,
and the first thing that Nancy could remember was
seeing her father strike her mother with his
clenched fist so that her mother fell over
sideways from the breakfast-table and lay
motionless. The mother was no doubt an irritating
woman and the privates of that regiment appeared
to have been irritating, too, so that the house
was a place of outcries and perpetual
disturbances. Mrs Rufford was Leonora's dearest
friend and Leonora could be cutting enough at
times. But I fancy she was as nothing to Mrs
Rufford. The Major would come in to lunch
harassed and already spitting out oaths after an
unsatisfactory morning's drilling of his stubborn
men beneath a hot sun. And then Mrs Rufford would
make some cutting remark and pandemonium would
break loose. Once, when she had been about
twelve, Nancy had tried to intervene between the
pair of them. Her father had struck her full upon
the forehead a blow so terrible that she had lain
unconscious for three days. Nevertheless, Nancy
seemed to prefer her father to her mother. She
remembered rough kindnesses from him. Once or
twice when she had been quite small he had dressed
her in a clumsy, impatient, but very tender way.
It was nearly always impossible to get a servant
to stay in the family and, for days at a time,
apparently, Mrs Rufford would be incapable. I
fancy she drank. At any rate, she had so cutting
a tongue that even Nancy was afraid of her--she so
made fun of any tenderness, she so sneered at all
emotional displays. Nancy must have been a very
emotional child.

Then one day, quite suddenly, on her return
from a ride at Fort William, Nancy had been sent,
with her governess, who had a white face, right
down South to that convent school. She had been
expecting to go there in two months' time. Her
mother disappeared from her life at that time. A
fortnight later Leonora came to the convent and
told her that her mother was dead. Perhaps she
was. At any rate, I never heard until the very
end what became of Mrs Rufford. Leonora never
spoke of her.

And then Major Rufford went to India, from
which he returned very seldom and only for very
short visits; and Nancy lived herself gradually
into the life at Branshaw Teleragh. I think that,
from that time onwards, she led a very happy life,
till the end. There were dogs and horses and old
servants and the Forest. And there were Edward
and Leonora, who loved her.

I had known her all the time--I mean, that she
always came to the Ashburnhams' at Nauheim for the
last fortnight of their stay--and I watched her
gradually growing. She was very cheerful with me.
She always even kissed me, night and morning,
until she was about eighteen. And she would skip
about and fetch me things and laugh at my tales of
life in Philadelphia. But, beneath her gaiety, I
fancy that there lurked some terrors. I remember
one day, when she was just eighteen, during one of
her father's rare visits to Europe, we were
sitting in the gardens, near the iron-stained
fountain. Leonora had one of her headaches and we
were waiting for Florence and Edward to come from
their baths. You have no idea how beautiful Nancy
looked that morning.

We were talking about the desirability of
taking tickets in lotteries--of the moral side of
it, I mean. She was all in white, and so tall and
fragile; and she had only just put her hair up, so
that the carriage of her neck had that charming
touch of youth and of unfamiliarity. Over her
throat there played the reflection from a little
pool of water, left by a thunderstorm of the night
before, and all the rest of her features were in
the diffused and luminous shade of her white
parasol. Her dark hair just showed beneath her
broad, white hat of pierced, chip straw; her
throat was very long and leaned forward, and her
eyebrows, arching a little as she laughed at some
old-fashionedness in my phraseology, had abandoned
their tense line. And there was a little colour
in her cheeks and light in her deep blue eyes.
And to think that that vivid white thing, that
saintly and swanlike being--to think that. . .
Why, she was like the sail of a ship, so white and
so definite in her movements. And to think that
she will never . . . Why, she will never do
anything again. I can't believe it .
. .

Anyhow, we were chattering away about the
morality of lotteries. And then, suddenly, there
came from the arcades behind us the overtones of
her father's unmistakable voice; it was as if a
modified foghorn had boomed with a reed inside it.
I looked round to catch sight of him. A tall,
fair, stiffly upright man of fifty, he was walking
away with an Italian baron who had had much to do
with the Belgian Congo. They must have been
talking about the proper treatment of natives, for
I heard him say:

"Oh, hang humanity!"

When I looked again at Nancy her eyes were
closed and her face was more pallid than her
dress, which had at least some pinkish reflections
from the gravel. It was dreadful to see her with
her eyes closed like that.

"Oh!" she exclaimed, and her hand
that had appeared to be groping, settled for a
moment on my arm. "Never speak of it.
Promise never to tell my father of it. It brings
back those dreadful dreams . . ." And, when
she opened her eyes she looked straight into mine.
"The blessed saints," she said,
"you would think they would spare you such
things. I don't believe all the sinning in the
world could make one deserve them."

They say the poor thing was always allowed a
light at night, even in her bedroom. . . . And
yet, no young girl could more archly and lovingly
have played with an adored father. She was always
holding him by both coat lapels; cross-questioning
him as to how he spent his time; kissing the top
of his head. Ah, she was well-bred, if ever
anyone was.

The poor, wretched man cringed before her--but
she could not have done more to put him at his
ease. Perhaps she had had lessons in it at her
convent. It was only that peculiar note of his
voice, used when he was overbearing or dogmatic,
that could unman her--and that was only visible
when it came unexpectedly. That was because the
bad dreams that the blessed saints allowed her to
have for her sins always seemed to her to herald
themselves by the booming sound of her father's
voice. It was that sound that had always preceded
his entrance for the terrible lunches of her
childhood. . . .

I have reported, earlier in this chapter, that
Leonora said, during that remainder of their stay
at Nauheim, after I had left, it had seemed to her
that she was fighting a long duel with unseen
weapons against silent adversaries. Nancy, as I
have also said, was always trying to go off with
Edward alone. That had been her habit for years.
And Leonora found it to be her duty to stop that.
It was very difficult. Nancy was used to having
her own way, and for years she had been used to
going off with Edward, ratting, rabbiting,
catching salmon down at Fordingbridge,
district-visiting of the sort that Edward indulged
in, or calling on the tenants. And at Nauheim she
and Edward had always gone up to the Casino alone
in the evenings--at any rate, whenever Florence
did not call for his attendance. It shows the
obviously innocent nature of the regard of those
two that even Florence had never had any idea of
jealousy. Leonora had cultivated the habit of
going to bed at ten o'clock.

I don't know how she managed it, but, for all
the time they were at Nauheim, she contrived never
to let those two be alone together, except in
broad daylight, in very crowded places. If a
Protestant had done that it would no doubt have
awakened a self-consciousness in the girl. But
Catholics, who have always reservations and queer
spots of secrecy, can manage these things better.
And I dare say that two things made this
easier--the death of Florence and the fact that
Edward was obviously sickening. He appeared,
indeed, to be very ill; his shoulders began to be
bowed; there were pockets under his eyes; he had
extraordinary moments of inattention.

And Leonora describes herself as watching him
as a fierce cat watches an unconscious pigeon in a
roadway. In that silent watching, again, I think
she was a Catholic--of a people that can think
thoughts alien to ours and keep them to
themselves. And the thoughts passed through her
mind; some of them even got through to Edward with
never a word spoken. At first she thought that it
might be remorse, or grief, for the death of
Florence that was oppressing him. But she watched
and watched, and uttered apparently random
sentences about Florence before the girl, and she
perceived that he had no grief and no remorse. He
had not any idea that Florence could have
committed suicide without writing at least a
tirade to him. The absence of that made him
certain that it had been heart disease. For
Florence had never undeceived him on that point.
She thought it made her seem more romantic.

No, Edward had no remorse. He was able to say
to himself that he had treated Florence with
gallant attentiveness of the kind that she desired
until two hours before her death. Leonora
gathered that from the look in his eyes, and from
the way he straightened his shoulders over her as
she lay in her coffin--from that and a thousand
other little things. She would speak suddenly
about Florence to the girl and he would not start
in the least; he would not even pay attention, but
would sit with bloodshot eyes gazing at the
tablecloth. He drank a good deal, at that time--a
steady soaking of drink every evening till long
after they had gone to bed.

For Leonora made the girl go to bed at ten,
unreasonable though that seemed to Nancy. She
would understand that, whilst they were in a sort
of half mourning for Florence, she ought not to be
seen at public places, like the Casino; but she
could not see why she should not accompany her
uncle upon his evening strolls though the park. I
don't know what Leonora put up as an
excuse--something, I fancy, in the nature of a
nightly orison that she made the girl and herself
perform for the soul of Florence. And then, one
evening, about a fortnight later, when the girl,
growing restive at even devotional exercises,
clamoured once more to be allowed to go for a walk
with Edward, and when Leonora was really at her
wits' end, Edward gave himself into her hands. He
was just standing up from dinner and had his face
averted.

But he turned his heavy head and his bloodshot
eyes upon his wife and looked full at her.

He continued to look at Leonora for a long
minute--with a sort of heavy contempt. And
Leonora understood that, with his speech, he was
giving her the excuse that she needed for
separating him from the girl, and with his eyes he
was reproaching her for thinking that he would try
to corrupt Nancy.

He went silently up to his room and sat there
for a long time--until the girl was well in
bed--reading in the Anglican prayer-book. And
about half-past ten she heard his footsteps pass
her door, going outwards. Two and a half hours
later they came back, stumbling heavily.

She remained, reflecting upon this position
until the last night of their stay at Nauheim.
Then she suddenly acted. For, just in the same
way, suddenly after dinner, she looked at him and
said:

"Teddy, don't you think you could take a
night off from your doctor's orders and go with
Nancy to the Casino. The poor child has had her
visit so spoiled."

He looked at her in turn for a long, balancing
minute.

"Why, yes," he said at last.

Nancy jumped out of her chair and kissed him.

Those two words, Leonora said, gave her the
greatest relief of any two syllables she had ever
heard in her life. For she realized that Edward
was breaking up, not under the desire for
possession, but from the dogged determination to
hold his hand. She could relax some of her
vigilance.

Nevertheless, she sat in the darkness behind
her half-closed jalousies, looking over the street
and the night and the trees until, very late, she
could hear Nancy's clear voice coming closer and
saying:

"You did look an old guy with that false
nose."

There had been some sort of celebration of a
local holiday up in the Kursaal. And Edward
replied with his sort of sulky good nature:

"As for you, you looked like old Mother
Sideacher."

The girl came swinging along, a silhouette
beneath a gas-lamp; Edward, another, slouched at
her side. They were talking just as they had
talked any time since the girl had been seventeen;
with the same tones, the same joke about an old
beggar woman who always amused them at Branshaw.
The girl, a little later, opened Leonora's door
whilst she was still kissing Edward on the
forehead as she had done every night.

"We've had a most glorious time," she
said. "He's ever so much better. He raced
me for twenty yards home. Why are you all in the
dark?"

Leonora could hear Edward going about in his
room, but, owing to the girl's chatter, she could
not tell whether he went out again or not. And
then, very much later, because she thought that if
he were drinking again something must be done to
stop it, she opened for the first time, and very
softly, the never-opened door between their rooms.
She wanted to see if he had gone out again.
Edward was kneeling beside his bed with his head
hidden in the counterpane. His arms,
outstretched, held out before him a little image
of the Blessed Virgin--a tawdry, scarlet and
Prussian blue affair that the girl had given him
on her first return from the convent. His
shoulders heaved convulsively three times, and
heavy sobs came from him before she could close
the door. He was not a Catholic; but that was the
way it took him.

Leonora slept for the first time that night
with a sleep from which she never once
started.

III

AND then Leonora completely broke down--on the
day that they returned to Branshaw Teleragh. It
is the infliction of our miserable minds--it is
the scourge of atrocious but probably just destiny
that no grief comes by itself. No, any great
grief, though the grief itself may have gone,
leaves in its place a train of horrors, of misery,
and despair. For Leonora was, in herself,
relieved. She felt that she could trust Edward
with the girl and she knew that Nancy could be
absolutely trusted. And then, with the slackening
of her vigilance, came the slackening of her
entire mind. This is perhaps the most miserable
part of the entire story. For it is miserable to
see a clean intelligence waver; and Leonora
wavered.

You are to understand that Leonora loved Edward
with a passion that was yet like an agony of
hatred. And she had lived with him for years and
years without addressing to him one word of
tenderness. I don't know how she could do it. At
the beginning of that relationship she had been
just married off to him. She had been one of
seven daughters in a bare, untidy Irish
manor-house to which she had returned from the
convent I have so often spoken of. She had left
it just a year and she was just nineteen. It is
impossible to imagine such inexperience as was
hers. You might almost say that she had never
spoken to a man except a priest. Coming straight
from the convent, she had gone in behind the high
walls of the manor-house that was almost more
cloistral than any convent could have been. There
were the seven girls, there was the strained
mother, there was the worried father at whom,
three times in the course of that year, the
tenants took pot-shots from behind a hedge. The
women-folk, upon the whole, the tenants respected.
Once a week each of the girls, since there were
seven of them, took a drive with the mother in the
old basketwork chaise drawn by a very fat, very
lumbering pony. They paid occasionally a call,
but even these were so rare that, Leonora has
assured me, only three times in the year that
succeeded her coming home from the convent did she
enter another person's house. For the rest of the
time the seven sisters ran about in the neglected
gardens between the unpruned espaliers. Or they
played lawn-tennis or fives in an angle of a great
wall that surrounded the garden--an angle from
which the fruit trees had long died away. They
painted in water-colour; they embroidered; they
copied verses into albums. Once a week they went
to Mass; once a week to the confessional,
accompanied by an old nurse. They were happy
since they had known no other life.

It appeared to them a singular extravagance
when, one day, a photographer was brought over
from the county town and photographed them
standing, all seven, in the shadow of an old apple
tree with the grey lichen on the raddled trunk.

But it wasn't an extravagance.

Three weeks before Colonel Powys had written to
Colonel Ashburnham:

"I say, Harry, couldn't your Edward marry
one of my girls? It would be a god-send to me,
for I'm at the end of my tether and, once one girl
begins to go off, the rest of them will
follow."

He went on to say that all his daughters were
tall, upstanding, clean-limbed and absolutely
pure, and he reminded Colonel Ashburnham that,
they having been married on the same day, though
in different churches, since the one was a
Catholic and the other an Anglican--they had said
to each other, the night before, that, when the
time came, one of their sons should marry one of
their daughters. Mrs Ashburnham had been a Powys
and remained Mrs Powys' dearest friend. They had
drifted about the world as English soldiers do,
seldom meeting, but their women always in
correspondence one with another. They wrote about
minute things such as the teething of Edward and
of the earlier daughters or the best way to repair
a Jacob's ladder in a stocking. And, if they met
seldom, yet it was often enough to keep each
other's personalities fresh in their minds,
gradually growing a little stiff in the joints,
but always with enough to talk about and with a
store of reminiscences. Then, as his girls began
to come of age when they must leave the convent in
which they were regularly interned during his
years of active service, Colonel Powys retired
from the army with the necessity of making a home
for them. It happened that the Ashburnhams had
never seen any of the Powys girls, though,
whenever the four parents met in London, Edward
Ashburnham was always of the party. He was at
that time twenty-two and, I believe, almost as
pure in mind as Leonora herself. It is odd how a
boy can have his virgin intelligence untouched in
this world.

That was partly due to the careful handling of
his mother, partly to the fact that the house to
which he went at Winchester had a particularly
pure tone and partly to Edward's own peculiar
aversion from anything like coarse language or
gross stories. At Sandhurst he had just kept out
of the way of that sort of thing. He was keen on
soldiering, keen on mathematics, on
land-surveying, on politics and, by a queer warp
of his mind, on literature. Even when he was
twenty-two he would pass hours reading one of
Scott's novels or the Chronicles of Froissart.

Mrs Ashburnham considered that she was to be
congratulated, and almost every week she wrote to
Mrs Powys, dilating upon her satisfaction.

Then, one day, taking a walk down Bond Street
with her son, after having been at Lord's, she
noticed Edward suddenly turn his head round to
take a second look at a well-dressed girl who had
passed them. She wrote about that, too, to Mrs
Powys, and expressed some alarm. It had been, on
Edward's part, the merest reflex action. He was
so very abstracted at that time owing to the
pressure his crammer was putting upon him that he
certainly hadn't known what he was doing.

It was this letter of Mrs Ashburnham's to Mrs
Powys that had caused the letter from Colonel
Powys to Colonel Ashburnham--a letter that was
half-humorous, half longing. Mrs Ashburnham
caused her husband to reply, with a letter a
little more jocular--something to the effect that
Colonel Powys ought to give them some idea of the
goods that he was marketing. That was the cause
of the photograph. I have seen it, the seven
girls, all in white dresses, all very much alike
in feature--all, except Leonora, a little heavy
about the chins and a little stupid about the
eyes. I dare say it would have made Leonora, too,
look a little heavy and a little stupid, for it
was not a good photograph. But the black shadow
from one of the branches of the apple tree cut
right across her face, which is all but invisible.

There followed an extremely harassing time for
Colonel and Mrs Powys. Mrs Ashburnham had written
to say that, quite sincerely, nothing would give
greater ease to her maternal anxieties than to
have her son marry one of Mrs Powys' daughters if
only he showed some inclination to do so. For,
she added, nothing but a love-match was to be
thought of in her Edward's case. But the poor
Powys couple had to run things so very fine that
even the bringing together of the young people was
a desperate hazard.

The mere expenditure upon sending one of the
girls over from Ireland to Branshaw was terrifying
to them; and whichever girl they selected might
not be the one to ring Edward's bell. On the
other hand, the expenditure upon mere food and
extra sheets for a visit from the Ashburnhams to
them was terrifying, too. It would mean,
mathematically, going short in so many meals
themselves, afterwards. Nevertheless, they
chanced it, and all the three Ashburnhams came on
a visit to the lonely manor-house. They could
give Edward some rough shooting, some rough
fishing and a whirl of femininity; but I should
say the girls made really more impression upon Mrs
Ashburnham than upon Edward himself. They
appeared to her to be so clean run and so safe.
They were indeed so clean run that, in a faint
sort of way, Edward seems to have regarded them
rather as boys than as girls. And then, one
evening, Mrs Ashburnham had with her boy one of
those conversations that English mothers have with
English sons. It seems to have been a criminal
sort of proceeding, though I don't know what took
place at it. Anyhow, next morning Colonel
Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand
of Leonora. This caused some consternation to the
Powys couple, since Leonora was the third daughter
and Edward ought to have married the eldest. Mrs
Powys, with her rigid sense of the proprieties,
almost wished to reject the proposal. But the
Colonel, her husband, pointed out that the visit
would have cost them sixty pounds, what with the
hire of an extra servant, of a horse and car, and
with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra
tablecloths. There was nothing else for it but
the marriage. In that way Edward and Leonora
became man and wife.

I don't know that a very minute study of their
progress towards complete disunion is necessary.
Perhaps it is. But there are many things that I
cannot well make out, about which I cannot well
question Leonora, or about which Edward did not
tell me. I do not know that there was ever any
question of love from Edward to her. He regarded
her, certainly, as desirable amongst her sisters.
He was obstinate to the extent of saying that if
he could not have her he would not have any of
them. And, no doubt, before the marriage, he made
her pretty speeches out of books that he had read.
But, as far as he could describe his feelings at
all, later, it seems that, calmly and without any
quickening of the pulse, he just carried the girl
off, there being no opposition . It had, however,
been all so long ago that it seemed to him, at the
end of his poor life, a dim and misty affair. He
had the greatest admiration for Leonora.

He had the very greatest admiration. He
admired her for her truthfulness, for her
cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs,
for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin,
for the gold of her hair, for her religion, for
her sense of duty. It was a satisfaction to take
her about with him.

But she had not for him a touch of magnetism.
I suppose, really, he did not love her because she
was never mournful; what really made him feel good
in life was to comfort somebody who would be
darkly and mysteriously mournful. That he had
never had to do for Leonora. Perhaps, also, she
was at first too obedient. I do not mean to say
that she was submissive-- that she deferred, in
her j udgements, to his. She did not. But she
had been handed over to him, like some patient
medieval virgin; she had been taught all her life
that the first duty of a woman is to obey. And
there she was.

In her, at least, admiration for his qualities
very soon became love of the deepest description.
If his pulses never quickened she, so I have been
told, became what is called an altered being when
he approached her from the other side of a
dancing-floor. Her eyes followed him about full
of trustfulness, of admiration, of gratitude, and
of love. He was also, in a great sense, her
pastor and guide--and he guided her into what, for
a girl straight out of a convent, was almost
heaven. I have not the least idea of what an
English officer's wife's existence may be like.
At any rate, there were feasts, and chatterings,
and nice men who gave her the right sort of
admiration, and nice women who treated her as if
she had been a baby. And her confessor approved
of her life, and Edward let her give little treats
to the girls of the convent she had left, and the
Reverend Mother approved of him. There could not
have been a happier girl for five or six years.

For it was only at the end of that time that
clouds began, as the saying is, to arise. She was
then about twenty-three, and her purposeful
efficiency made her perhaps have a desire for
mastery. She began to perceive that Edward was
extravagant in his largesses. His parents died
just about that time, and Edward, though they both
decided that he should continue his soldiering,
gave a great deal of attention to the management
of Branshaw through a steward. Aldershot was not
very far away, and they spent all his leaves
there.

And, suddenly, she seemed to begin to perceive
that his generosities were almost fantastic. He
subscribed much too much to things connected with
his mess, he pensioned off his father's servants,
old or new, much too generously. They had a large
income, but every now and then they would find
themselves hard up. He began to talk of
mortgaging a farm or two, though it never actually
came to that.

She made tentative efforts at remonstrating
with him. Her father, whom she saw now and then,
said that Edward was much too generous to his
tenants; the wives of his brother officers
remonstrated with her in private; his large
subscriptions made it difficult for their husbands
to keep up with them. Ironically enough, the
first real trouble between them came from his
desire to build a Roman Catholic chapel at
Branshaw. He wanted to do it to honour Leonora,
and he proposed to do it very expensively.
Leonora did not want it; she could perfectly well
drive from Branshaw to the nearest Catholic Church
as often as she liked. There were no Roman
Catholic tenants and no Roman Catholic servants
except her old nurse who could always drive with
her. She had as many priests to stay with her as
could be needed--and even the priests did not want
a gorgeous chapel in that place where it would
have merely seemed an invidious instance of
ostentation. They were perfectly ready to
celebrate Mass for Leonora and her nurse, when
they stayed at Branshaw, in a cleaned-up outhouse.
But Edward was as obstinate as a hog about it.

He was truly grieved at his wife's want of
sentiment--at her refusal to receive that amount
of public homage from him. She appeared to him to
be wanting in imagination--to be cold and hard. I
don't exactly know what part her priests played in
the tragedy that it all became; I dare say they
behaved quite creditably but mistakenly. But
then, who would not have been mistaken with
Edward? I believe he was even hurt that Leonora's
confessor did not make strenuous efforts to
convert him. There was a period when he was quite
ready to become an emotional Catholic.

I don't know why they did not take him on the
hop; but they have queer sorts of wisdoms, those
people, and queer sorts of tact. Perhaps they
thought that Edward's too early conversion would
frighten off other Protestant desirables from
marrying Catholic girls. Perhaps they saw deeper
into Edward than he saw himself and thought that
he would make a not very creditable convert. At
any rate they--and Leonora--left him very much
alone. It mortified him very considerably. He
has told me that if Leonora had then taken his
aspirations seriously everything would have been
different. But I dare say that was nonsense.

At any rate, it was over the question of the
chapel that they had their first and really
disastrous quarrel. Edward at that time was not
well; he supposed himself to be overworked with
his regimental affairs--he was managing the mess
at the time. And Leonora was not well--she was
beginning to fear that their union might be
sterile. And then her father came over from
Glasmoyle to stay with them.

Those were troublesome times in Ireland, I
understand. At any rate, Colonel Powys had
tenants on the brain--his own tenants having shot
at him with shot-guns. And, in conversation with
Edward's land-steward, he got it into his head
that Edward managed his estates with a mad
generosity towards his tenants. I understand,
also, that those years--the 'nineties--were very
bad for farming. Wheat was fetching only a few
shillings the hundred; the price of meat was so
low that cattle hardly paid for raising; whole
English counties were ruined. And Edward allowed
his tenants very high rebates.

To do both justice Leonora has since
acknowledged that she was in the wrong at that
time and that Edward was following out a more
far-seeing policy in nursing his really very good
tenants over a bad period. It was not as if the
whole of his money came from the land; a good deal
of it was in rails. But old Colonel Powys had
that bee in his bonnet and, if he never directly
approached Edward himself on the subject, he
preached unceasingly, whenever he had the
opportunity, to Leonora. His pet idea was that
Edward ought to sack all his own tenants and
import a set of farmers from Scotland. That was
what they were doing in Essex. He was of opinion
that Edward was riding hotfoot to ruin.

That worried Leonora very much--it worried her
dreadfully; she lay awake nights; she had an
anxious line round her mouth. And that, again,
worried Edward. I do not mean to say that Leonora
actually spoke to Edward about his tenants--but he
got to know that some one, probably her father,
had been talking to her about the matter. He got
to know it because it was the habit of his steward
to look in on them every morning about
breakfast-time to report any little happenings.
And there was a farmer called Mumford who had only
paid half his rent for the last three years. One
morning the land-steward reported that Mumford
would be unable to pay his rent at all that year.
Edward reflected for a moment and then he said
something like:

"Oh well, he's an old fellow and his
family have been our tenants for over two hundred
years. Let him off altogether."

And then Leonora--you must remember that she
had reason for being very nervous and unhappy at
that time--let out a sound that was very like a
groan. It startled Edward, who more than
suspected what was passing in her mind--it
startled him into a state of anger. He said
sharply:

"You wouldn't have me turn out people
who've been earning money for us for
centuries--people to whom we have
responsibilities--and let in a pack of Scotch
farmers?"

He looked at her, Leonora said, with what was
practically a glance of hatred and then,
precipitately, he left the breakfast-table.
Leonora knew that it probably made it all the
worse that he had been betrayed into a
manifestation of anger before a third party. It
was the first and last time that he ever was
betrayed into such a manifestation of anger. The
land-steward, a moderate and well-balanced man
whose family also had been with the Ashburnhams
for over a century, took it upon himself to
explain that he considered Edward was pursuing a
perfectly proper course with his tenants. He
erred perhaps a little on the side of generosity,
but hard times were hard times, and every one had
to feel the pinch, landlord as well as tenants.
The great thing was not to let the land get into a
poor state of cultivation. Scotch farmers just
skinned your fields and let them go down and down.
But Edward had a very good set of tenants who did
their best for him and for themselves. These
arguments at that time carried very little
conviction to Leonora. She was, nevertheless,
much concerned by Edward's outburst of anger.

The fact is that Leonora had been practising
economies in her department. Two of the
under-housemaids had gone and she had not replaced
them; she had spent much less that year upon
dress. The fare she had provided at the dinners
they gave had been much less bountiful and not
nearly so costly as had been the case in preceding
years, and Edward began to perceive a hardness and
determination in his wife's character. He seemed
to see a net closing round him--a net in which
they would be forced to live like one of the
comparatively poor county families of the
neighbourhood. And, in the mysterious way in which two
people, living together, get to know each other's
thoughts without a word spoken, he had known, even
before his outbreak, that Leonora was worrying
about his managing of the estates. This appeared
to him to be intolerable. He had, too, a great
feeling of self-contempt because he had been
betrayed into speaking harshly to Leonora before
that land-steward. She imagined that his nerve
must be deserting him, and there can have been few
men more miserable than Edward was at that period.

You see, he was really a very simple soul--very
simple. He imagined that no man can
satisfactorily accomplish his life's work without
loyal and whole-hearted cooperation of the woman
he lives with. And he was beginning to perceive
dimly that, whereas his own traditions were
entirely collective, his wife was a sheer
individualist. His own theory--the feudal theory
of an over-lord doing his best by his dependents,
the dependents meanwhile doing their best for the
over-lord--this theory was entirely foreign to
Leonora's nature. She came of a family of small
Irish landlords--that hostile garrison in a
plundered country. And she was thinking
unceasingly of the children she wished to have.

I don't know why they never had any
children--not that I really believe that children
would have made any difference. The dissimilarity
of Edward and Leonora was too profound. It will
give you some idea of the extraordinary
naïveté of Edward Ashburnham that, at
the time of his marriage and for perhaps a couple
of years after, he did not really know how
children are produced. Neither did Leonora. I
don't mean to say that this state of things
continued, but there it was. I dare say it had a
good deal of influence on their mentalities. At
any rate, they never had a child. It was the Will
of God.

It certainly presented itself to Leonora as
being the Will of God--as being a mysterious and
awful chastisement of the Almighty. For she had
discovered shortly before this period that her
parents had not exacted from Edward's family the
promise that any children she should bear should
be brought up as Catholics. She herself had never
talked of the matter with either her father, her
mother, or her husband. When at last her father
had let drop some words leading her to believe
that that was the fact, she tried desperately to
extort the promise from Edward. She encountered
an unexpected obstinacy. Edward was perfectly
willing that the girls should be Catholic; the
boys must be Anglican. I don't understand the
bearing of these things in English society.
Indeed, Englishmen seem to me to be a little mad
in matters of politics or of religion. In Edward
it was particularly queer because he himself was
perfectly ready to become a Romanist. He seemed,
however, to contemplate going over to Rome himself
and yet letting his boys be educated in the
religion of their immediate ancestors. This may
appear illogical, but I dare say it is not so
illogical as it looks. Edward, that is to say,
regarded himself as having his own body and soul
at his own disposal. But his loyalty to the
traditions of his family would not permit him to
bind any future inheritors of his name or
beneficiaries by the death of his ancestors.
About the girls it did not so much matter. They
would know other homes and other circumstances.
Besides, it was the usual thing. But the boys
must be given the opportunity of choosing--and
they must have first of all the Anglican teaching.
He was perfectly unshakable about this.

Leonora was in an agony during all this time.
You will have to remember she seriously believed
that children who might be born to her went in
danger, if not absolutely of damnation, at any
rate of receiving false doctrine. It was an agony
more terrible than she could describe. She didn't
indeed attempt to describe it, but I could tell
from her voice when she said, almost negligently,
"I used to lie awake whole nights. It was no
good my spiritual advisers trying to console
me." I knew from her voice how terrible and
how long those nights must have seemed and of how
little avail were the consolations of her
spiritual advisers. Her spiritual advisers seemed
to have taken the matter a little more calmly.
They certainly told her that she must not consider
herself in any way to have sinned. Nay, they seem
even to have extorted, to have threatened her,
with a view to getting her out of what they
considered to be a morbid frame of mind. She
would just have to make the best of things, to
influence the children when they came, not by
propaganda, but by personality. And they warned
her that she would be committing a sin if she
continued to think that she had sinned.
Nevertheless, she continued to think that she had
sinned.

Leonora could not be aware that the man whom
she loved passionately and whom, nevertheless, she
was beginning to try to rule with a rod of
iron--that this man was becoming more and more estranged
from her. He seemed to regard her as being not
only physically and mentally cold, but even as
being actually wicked and mean. There were times
when he would almost shudder if she spoke to him.
And she could not understand how he could consider
her wicked or mean. It only seemed to her a sort
of madness in him that he should try to take upon
his own shoulders the burden of his troop, of his
regiment, of his estate and of half of his
country. She could not see that in trying to curb
what she regarded as megalomania she was doing
anything wicked. She was just trying to keep
things together for the sake of the children who
did not come. And, little by little, the whole of
their intercourse became simply one of agonized
discussion as to whether Edward should subscribe
to this or that institution or should try to
reclaim this or that drunkard. She simply could
not see it.

Into this really terrible position of strain,
from which there appeared to be no issue, the
Kilsyte case came almost as a relief. It is part
of the peculiar irony of things that Edward would
certainly never have kissed that nurse-maid if he
had not been trying to please Leonora.
Nurse-maids do not travel first-class, and, that
day, Edward travelled in a third-class carriage in
order to prove to Leonora that he was capable of
economies. I have said that the Kilsyte case came
almost as a relief to the strained situation that
then existed between them. It gave Leonora an
opportunity of backing him up in a whole-hearted
and absolutely loyal manner. It gave her the
opportunity of behaving to him as he considered a
wife should behave to her husband.

You see, Edward found himself in a railway
carriage with a quite pretty girl of about
nineteen. And the quite pretty girl of about
nineteen, with dark hair and red cheeks and blue
eyes, was quietly weeping. Edward had been
sitting in his corner thinking about nothing at
all. He had chanced to look at the nurse-maid;
two large, pretty tears came out of her eyes and
dropped into her lap. He immediately felt that he
had got to do something to comfort her. That was
his job in life. He was desperately unhappy
himself and it seemed to him the most natural
thing in the world that they should pool their
sorrows. He was quite democratic; the idea of the
difference in their station never seems to have
occurred to him. He began to talk to her. He
discovered that her young man had been seen
walking out with Annie of Number 54. He moved
over to her side of the carriage. He told her
that the report probably wasn't true; that, after
all, a young man might take a walk with Annie from
Number 54 without its denoting anything very
serious. And he assured me that he felt at least
quite half-fatherly when he put his arm around her
waist and kissed her. The girl, however, had not
forgotten the difference of her station.

All her life, by her mother, by other girls, by
schoolteachers, by the whole tradition of her
class she had been warned against gentlemen. She
was being kissed by a gentleman. She screamed,
tore herself away; sprang up and pulled a
communication cord.

Edward came fairly well out of the affair in
the public estimation; but it did him, mentally, a
good deal of harm.

IV

IT is very difficult to give an all-round
impression of an man. I wonder how far I have
succeeded with Edward Ashburnham. I dare say I
haven't succeeded at all. It is ever very
difficult to see how such things matter. Was it
the important point about poor Edward that he was
very well built, carried himself well, was moderate
at the table and led a regular life--that he had,
in fact, all the virtues that are usually
accounted English? Or have I in the least
succeeded in conveying that he was all those things
and had all those virtues? He certainly was them
and had them up to the last months of his life.
They were the things that one would set upon his
tombstone. They will, indeed, be set upon his
tombstone by his widow.

And have I, I wonder, given the due impression
of how his life was portioned and his time laid
out? Because, until the very last, the amount of
time taken up by his various passions was
relatively small. I have been forced to write
very much about his passions, but you have to
consider--I should like to be able to make you
consider--that he rose every morning at seven,
took a cold bath, breakfasted at eight, was
occupied with his regiment from nine until one;
played polo or cricket with the men when it was
the season for cricket, till tea-time. Afterwards
he would occupy himself with the letters from his
land-steward or with the affairs of his mess, till
dinner-time. He would dine and pass the evening
playing cards, or playing billiards with Leonora
or at social functions of one kind or another.
And the greater part of his life was taken up by
that--by far the greater part of his life. His
love-affairs, until the very end, were sandwiched
in at odd moments or took place during the social
evenings, the dances and dinners. But I guess I
have made it hard for you, O silent listener, to
get that impression. Anyhow, I hope I have not
given you the idea that Edward Ashburnham was a
pathological case. He wasn't. He was just a
normal man and very much of a sentimentalist. I
dare say the quality of his youth, the nature of
his mother's influence, his ignorances, the
crammings that he received at the hands of army
coaches--I dare say that all these excellent
influences upon his adolescence were very bad for
him. But we all have to put up with that sort of
thing and no doubt it is very bad for all of us.
Nevertheless, the outline of Edward's life was an
outline perfectly normal of the life of a
hard-working, sentimental and efficient
professional man.

That question of first impressions has always
bothered me a good deal-- but quite academically.
I mean that, from time to time I have wondered
whether it were or were not best to trust to one's
first impressions in dealing with people. But I
never had anybody to deal with except waiters and
chambermaids and the Ashburnhams, with whom I
didn't know that I was having any dealings. And,
as far as waiters and chambermaids were concerned,
I have generally found that my first impressions
were correct enough. If my first idea of a man
was that he was civil, obliging, and attentive, he
generally seemed to go on being all those things.
Once, however, at our Paris flat we had a maid who
appeared to be charming and transparently honest.
She stole, nevertheless, one of Florence's diamond
rings. She did it, however, to save her young man
from going to prison. So here, as somebody says
somewhere, was a special case.

And, even in my short incursion into American
business life--an incursion that lasted during
part of August and nearly the whole of
September--I found that to rely upon first
impressions was the best thing I could do. I
found myself automatically docketing and labelling
each man as he was introduced to me, by the run of
his features and by the first words that he spoke.
I can't, however, be regarded as really doing
business during the time that I spent in the
United States. I was just winding things up. If
it hadn't been for my idea of marrying the girl I
might possibly hav looked for something to do in
my own country. For my experiences there were
vivid and amusing. It was exactly as if I had
come out of a museum into a riotous fancy-dress
ball. During my life with Florence I had almost
come to forget that there were such things as
fashions or occupations or the greed of gain. I
had, in fact, forgotten that there was such a
thing as a dollar and that a dollar can be
extremely desirable if you don't happen to possess
one. And I had forgotten, too, that there was
such a thing as gossip that mattered. In that
particular, Philadelphia was the most amazing
place I have ever been in in my life. I was not
in that city for more than a week or ten days and
I didn't there transact anything much in the way
of business; nevertheless, the number of times
that I was warned by everybody against everybody
else was simply amazing. A man I didn't know
would come up behind my lounge chair in the hotel,
and, whispering cautiously beside my ear, would
warn me against some other man that I equally
didn't know but who would be standing by the bar.
I don't know what they thought I was there to
do--perhaps to buy out the city's debt or get a
controlling hold of some railway interest. Or,
perhaps, they imagined that I wanted to buy a
newspaper, for they were either politicians or
reporters, which, of course, comes to the same
thing. As a matter of fact, my property in
Philadelphia was mostly real estate in the
old-fashioned part of the city and all I wanted to
do there was just to satisfy myself that the
houses were in good repair and the doors kept
properly painted. I wanted also to see my
relations, of whom I had a few. These were mostly
professional people and they were mostly rather
hard up because of the big bank failure in 1907 or
thereabouts. Still, they were very nice. They
would have been nicer still if they hadn't, all of
them, had what appeared to me to be the mania that
what they called influences were working against
them. At any rate, the impression of that city
was one of old-fashioned rooms, rather English
than American in type, in which handsome but
careworn ladies, cousins of my own, talked
principally about mysterious movements that were
going on against them. I never got to know what
it was all about; perhaps they thought I knew or
perhaps there weren't any movements at all. It
was all very secret and subtle and subterranean.
But there was a nice young fellow called Carter
who was a sort of second-nephew of mine, twice
removed. He was handsome and dark and gentie and
tall and modest. I understand also that he was a
good cricketer. He was employed by the
real-estate agents who collected my rents. It was
he, therefore, who took me over my own property
and I saw a good deal of him and of a nice girl
called Mary, to whom he was engaged. At that time
I did, what I certainly shouldn't do now--I made
some careful inquiries as to his character. I
discovered from his employers that he was just all
that he appeared, honest, industrious,
high-spirited, friendly and ready to do anyone a
good turn. His relatives, however, as they were
mine, too--seemed to have something darkly
mysterious against him. I imagined that he must
have been mixed up in some case of graft or that
he had at least betrayed several innocent and
trusting maidens. I pushed, however, that
particular mystery home and discovered it was only
that he was a Democrat. My own people were mostly
Republicans. It seemed to make it worse and more
darkly mysterious to them that young Carter was
what they called a sort of a Vermont Democrat
which was the whole ticket and no mistake. But I
don't know what it means. Anyhow, I suppose that
my money will go to him when I die--I like the
recollection of his friendly image and of the nice
girl he was engaged to. May Fate deal very kindly
with them.

I have said just now that, in my present frame
of mind, nothing would ever make me make inquiries
as to the character of any man that I liked at
first sight. (The little digression as to my
Philadelphia experiences was really meant to lead
around to this.) For who in this world can give
anyone a character? Who in this world knows
anything of any other heart--or of his own? I
don't mean to say that one cannot form an average
estimate of the way a person will behave. But one
cannot be certain of the way any man will behave
in every case--and until one can do that a
"character" is of no use to anyone.
That, for instance, was the way with Florence's
maid in Paris. We used to trust that girl with
blank cheques for the payment of the tradesmen.
For quite a time she was so trusted by us. Then,
suddenly, she stole a ring. We should not have
believed her capable of it; she would not have
believed herself capable of it. It was nothing in
her character. So, perhaps, it was with Edward
Ashburnham.

Or, perhaps, it wasn't. No, I rather think it
wasn't. It is difficult to figure out. I have
said that the Kilsyte case eased the immediate
tension for him and Leonora. It let him see that
she was capable of loyalty to him; it gave her her
chance to show that she believed in him. She
accepted without question his statement that, in
kissing the girl, he wasn't trying to do more than
administer fatherly comfort to a weeping child.
And, indeed, his own world--including the
magistrates--took that view of the case. Whatever
people say, one's world can be perfectly
charitable at times . . . But, again, as I have
said, it did Edward a great deal of harm.

That, at least, was his view of it. He assured
me that, before that case came on and was wrangled
about by counsel with all sorts of
dirty-mindedness that counsel in that sort of case
can impute, he had not had the least idea that he
was capable of being unfaithful to Leonora. But,
in the midst of that tumult--he says that it came
suddenly into his head whilst he was in the
witness-box--in the midst of those august
ceremonies of the law there came suddenly into his
mind the recollection of the softness of the
girl's body as he had pressed her to him. And,
from that moment, that girl appeared desirable to
him--and Leonora completely unattractive.

He began to indulge in day-dreams in which he
approached the nurse-maid more tactfully and
carried the matter much further. Occasionally he
thought of other women in terms of wary
courtship--or, perhaps, it would be more exact to
say that he thought of them in terms of tactful
comforting, ending in absorption. That was his
own view of the case. He saw himself as the
victim of the law. I don't mean to say that he
saw himself as a kind of Dreyfus. The law,
practically, was quite kind to him. It stated
that in its view Captain Ashburnham had been
misled by an ill-placed desire to comfort a member
of the opposite sex, and it fined him five
shilling for his want of tact, or of knowledge of
the world. But Edward maintained that it had put
ideas into his head.

I don't believe it, though he certainly did.
He was twenty-seven then, and his wife was out of
sympathy with him--some crash was inevitable.
There was between them a momentary rapprochement;
but it could not last. It made it, probably, all
the worse that, in that particular matter, Leonara
had come so very well up to the scratch. For,
whilst Edward respected her more and was grateful
to her, it made her seem by so much the more cold
in other matters that were near his heart--his
responsibilities, his career, his tradition. It
brought his despair of her up to a point of
exasperation--and it riveted on him the idea that
he might find some other woman who would give him
the moral support that he needed. He wanted to be
looked upon as a sort of Lohengrin.

At that time, he says, he went about
deliberately looking
for some woman who could help him. He found
several--for there were quite a number of ladies
in his set who were capable of agreeing with this
handsome and fine fellow that the duties of a
feudal gentleman were feudal. He would have liked
to pass his days talking to one or other of these
ladies. But there was always an obstacle--if the
lady were married there would be a husband who
claimed the greater part of her time and
attention. If, on the other hand, it were an
unmarried girl, he could not see very much of her
for fear of compromising her. At that date, you
understand, he had not the least idea of seducing
any one of these ladies. He wanted only moral
support at the hands of some female, because he
found men difficult to talk to about ideals.
Indeed, I do not believe that he had, at any time,
any idea of making any one his mistress. That
sounds queer; but I believe it is quite true as a
statement of character.

It was, I believe, one of Leonora's priests--a
man of the world--who suggested that she should
take him to Monte Carlo. He had the idea that
what Edward needed, in order to fit him for the
society of Leonora, was a touch of
irresponsibility. For Edward, at that date, had
much the aspect of a prig. I mean that, if he
played polo and was an excellent dancer he did the
one for the sake of keeping himself fit and the
other because it was a social duty to show himself
at dances, and, when there, to dance well. He did
nothing for fun except what he considered to be
his work in life. As the priest saw it, this must
for ever estrange him from Leonora --not because
Leonora set much store by the joy of life, but
because she was out of sympathy with Edward's
work. On the other hand, Leonora did like to have
a good time, now and then, and, as the priest saw
it, if Edward could be got to like having a good
time now and then, too, there would be a bond of
sympathy between them. It was a good idea, but it
worked out wrongly.

It worked out, in fact, in the mistress of the
Grand Duke. In anyone less sentimental than
Edward that would not have mattered. With Edward
it was fatal. For, such was his honourable
nature, that for him to enjoy a woman's favours
made him feel that she had a bond on him for life.
That was the way it worked out in practice.
Psychologically it meant that he could not have a
mistress without falling violently in love with
her. He was a serious person--and in this
particular case it was very expensive. The
mistress of the Grand Duke--a Spanish dancer of
passionate appearance --singled out Edward for her
glances at a ball that was held in their common
hotel. Edward was tall, handsome, blond and very
wealthy as she understood--and Leonora went up to
bed early. She did not care for public dances,
but she was relieved to see that Edward appeared
to be having a good time with several amiable
girls. And that was the end of Edward--for the
Spanish dancer of passionate appearance wanted one
night of him for his beaux yeux. He took her into
the dark gardens and, remembering suddenly the
girl of the Kilsyte case, he kissed her. He
kissed her passionately, violently, with a sudden
explosion of the passion that had been bridled all
his life--for Leonora was cold, or at any rate,
well behaved. La Dolciquita liked this reversion,
and he passed the night in her bed.

When the palpitating creature was at last
asleep in his arms he discovered that he was
madly, was passionately, was overwhelmingly in
love with her. It was a passion that had arisen
like fire in dry corn. He could think of nothing
else; he could live for nothing else. But La
Dolciquita was a reasonable creature without an
ounce of passion in her. She wanted a certain
satisfaction of her appetites and Edward had
appealed to her the night before. Now that was
done with, and, quite coldly, she said that she
wanted money if he was to have any more of her.
It was a perfectly reasonable commercial
transaction. She did not care two buttons for
Edward or for any man and he was asking her to
risk a very good situation with the Grand Duke.
If Edward could put up sufficient money to serve
as a kind of insurance against accident she was
ready to like Edward for a time that would be
covered, as it were, by the policy. She was
getting fifty thousand dollars a year from her
Grand Duke; Edward would have to pay a premium of
two years' hire for a month of her society. There
would not be much risk of the Grand Duke's finding
it out and it was not certain that he would give
her the keys of the street if he did find out.
But there was the risk--a twenty per cent risk, as
she figured it out. She talked to Edward as if
she had been a solicitor with an estate to
sell--perfectly quietly and perfectly coldly without
any inflections in her voice. She did not want to
be unkind to him; but she could see no reason for
being kind to him. She was a virtuous business
woman with a mother and two sisters and her own
old age to be provided comfortably for. She did
not expect more than a five years' further run.
She was twenty-four and, as she said: "We
Spanish women are horrors at thirty." Edward
swore that he would provide for her for life if
she would come to him and leave off talking so
horribly; but she only shrugged one shoulder
slowly and contemptuously. He tried to convince
this woman, who, as he saw it, had surrendered to
him her virtue, that he regarded it as in any case
his duty to provide for her, and to cherish her
and even to love her--for life. In return for her
sacrifice he would do that. In return, again, for
his honourable love she would listen for ever to
the accounts of his estate. That was how he
figured it out.

She shrugged the same shoulder with the same
gesture and held out her left hand with the elbow
at her side:

"Enfin, mon ami," she said, "put
in this hand the price of that tiara at Forli's or
. . ." And she turned her back on him.

Edward went mad; his world stood on its head;
the palms in front of the blue sea danced
grotesque dances. You see,
he believed in the virtue, tenderness and moral
support of women. He wanted more than anything to
argue with La Dolciquita; to retire with her to an
island and point out to her the damnation of her
point of view and how salvation can only be found
in true love and the feudal system. She had once
been his mistress, he reflected, and by all the
moral laws she ought to have gone on being his
mistress or at the very least his sympathetic
confidante. But her rooms were closed to him; she
did not appear in the hotel. Nothing: blank
silence. To break that down he had to have twenty
thousand pounds. You have heard what happened.

He spent a week of madness; he hungered; his
eyes sank in; he shuddered at Leonora's touch. I
dare say that nine-tenths of what he took to be
his passion for La Dolciquita was really
discomfort at the thought that he had been
unfaithful to Leonora. He felt uncommonly bad,
that is to say--oh, unbearably bad, and he took it
all to be love. Poor devil, he was incredibly
naïve. He drank like a fish after Leonora
was in bed and he spread himself over the tables,
and this went on for about a fortnight. Heaven
knows what would have happened; he would have
thrown away every penny that he possessed.

On the night after he had lost about forty
thousand pounds and whilst the whole hotel was
whispering about it, La Dolciquita walked
composedly into his bedroom. He was too drunk to
recognize her, and she sat in his arm-chair,
knitting and holding smelling salts to her
nose--for he was pretty far gone with alcoholic
poisoning--and, as soon as he was able to
understand her, she said:

"Look here, mon ami, do not go to the
tables again. Take a good sleep now and come and
see me this afternoon."

He slept till the lunch-hour. By that time
Leonora had heard the news. A Mrs Colonel Whelan
had told her. Mrs Colonel Whelan seems to have
been the only sensible person who was ever
connected with the Ashburnhams. She
had argued it out that there must be a woman of
the harpy variety connected with Edward's
incredible behaviour and mien; and she advised
Leonora to go straight off to Town--which might
have the effect of bringing Edward to his
senses--and to consult her solicitor and her
spiritual adviser. She had better go that very
morning; it was no good arguing with a man in
Edward's condition.

Edward, indeed, did not know that she had gone.
As soon as he awoke he went straight to La
Dolciquita's room and she stood him his lunch in
her own apartments. He fell on her neck and wept,
and she put up with it for a time. She was quite
a good-natured woman. And, when she had calmed
him down with Eau de Mélisse, she said:

"Look here, my friend, how much money have
you left? Five thousand dollars? Ten?" For
the rumour went that Edward had lost two kings'
ransoms a night for fourteen nights and she
imagined that he must be near the end of his
resources.

The Eau de Mélisse had calmed Edward to
such an extent that, for the moment, he really had
a head on his shoulders. He did nothing more than
grunt:

"And then?"

"Why," she answered, "I may just
as well have the ten thousand dollars as the
tables. I will go with you to Antibes for a week
for that sum."

Edward grunted: "Five." She tried to
get seven thousand five hundred; but he stuck to
his five thousand and the hotel expenses at
Antibes. The sedative carried him just as far as
that and then he collapsed again. He had to leave
for Antibes at three; he could not do without it.
He left a note for Leonora saying that he had gone
off for a week with the Clinton Morleys,
yachting.

He did not enjoy himself very much at Antibes.
La Dolciquita could talk of nothing with any
enthusiasm except money, and she tired him
unceasingly, during every waking hour, for
presents of the most expensive description. And,
at the end of a week, she just quietly kicked him
out. He hung about in Antibes for three days. He
was cured of the idea that he had any duties
towards La Dolciquita--feudal or otherwise. But
his sentimentalism required of him an attitude of
Byronic gloom--as if his court had gone into
half-mourning. Then his appetite suddenly
returned, and he remembered Leonora. He found at
his hotel at Monte Carlo a telegram from Leonora,
dispatched from London, saying; "Please
return as soon as convenient." He could not
understand why Leonora should have abandoned him
so precipitately when she only thought that he had
gone yachting with the Clinton Morleys. Then he
discovered that she had left the hotel before he
had written the note. He had a pretty rocky
journey back to town; he was frightened out of his
life--and Leonora had never seemed so desirable to
him.

V

I CALL this the Saddest Story, rather than
"The Ashburnham Tragedy", just because
it is so sad, just because there was no current to
draw things along to a swift and inevitable end.
There is about it none of the elevation that
accompanies tragedy; there is about it no nemesis,
no destiny. Here were two noble people--for I am
convinced that both Edward and Leonora had noble
natures--here, then, were two noble natures,
drifting down life, like fireships afloat on a
lagoon and causing miseries, heart-aches, agony of
the mind and death. And they themselves steadily
deteriorated. And why? For what purpose? To
point what lesson? It is all a darkness.

There is not even any villain in the story--for
even Major Basil, the husband of the lady who
next, and really, comforted the unfortunate Edward
--even Major Basil was not a villain in this
piece. He was a slack, loose, shiftless sort of
fellow--but he did not do anything to Edward.
Whilst they were in the same station in Burma he
borrowed a good deal of money--though, really,
since Major Basil had no particular vices, it was
difficult to know why he wanted it. He
collected--different types of horses' bits from
the earliest times to the present day--but, since
he did not prosecute even this occupation with any
vigour, he cannot have needed much money for the
acquirement, say, of the bit of Genghis Khan's
charger--if Genghis Khan had a charger. And when
I say that he borrowed a good deal of money from
Edward I do not mean to say that he had more than
a thousand pounds from him during the five years
that the connection lasted. Edward, of course,
did not have a great deal of money; Leonora was
seeing to that. Still, he may have had five
hundred pounds a year English, for his menus
plaisirs--for his regimental subscriptions and for
keeping his men smart. Leonora hated that; she
would have preferred to buy dresses for herself or
to have devoted the money to paying off a
mortgage. Still, with her sense of justice, she
saw that, since she was managing a property
bringing in three thousand a year with a view to
re-establishing it as a property of five thousand
a year and since the property really, if not
legally, belonged to Edward, it was reasonable and
just that Edward should get a slice of his own.
Of course she had the devil of a job.

I don't know that I have got the financial
details exactly right. I am a pretty good head at
figures, but my mind, still, sometimes mixes up
pounds with dollars and I get a figure wrong.
Anyhow, the proposition was something like this:
Properly worked and without rebates to the tenants
and keeping up schools and things, the Branshaw
estate should have brought in about five thousand
a year when Edward had it. It brought in actually
about four. (I am talking in pounds, not
dollars.) Edward's excesses with the Spanish Lady
had reduced its value to about three--as the
maximum figure, without reductions. Leonora
wanted to get it back to five.

She was, of course, very young to be faced with
such a proposition--twenty-four is not a very
advanced age. So she did things with a youthful
vigour that she would, very likely, have made more
merciful, if she had known more about life. She
got Edward remarkably on the hop. He had to face
her in a London hotel, when he crept back from
Monte Carlo with his poor tail between his poor
legs. As far as I can make out she cut short his
first mumblings and his first attempts at
affectionate speech with words something like:

"We're on the verge of ruin. Do you
intend to let me pull things together? If not I
shall retire to Hendon on my jointure."
(Hendon represented a convent to which she
occasionally went for what is called a
"retreat" in Catholic circles.)

And poor dear Edward knew nothing--absolutely
nothing. He did not know how much money he had,
as he put it, "blued" at the tables. It
might have been a quarter of a million for all he
remembered. He did not know whether she knew
about La Dolciquita or whether she imagined that
he had gone off yachting or had stayed at Monte
Carlo. He was just dumb and he just wanted to get
into a hole and not have to talk. Leonora did not
make him talk and she said nothing herself.

I do not know much about English legal
procedure--I cannot, I mean, give technical
details of how they tied him up. But I know that,
two days later, without her having said more than
I have reported to you, Leonora and her attorney
had become the trustees, as I believe it is
called, of all Edward's property, and there was an
end of Edward as the good landlord and father of
his people. He went out. Leonora then had three
thousand a year at her disposal. She occupied
Edward with getting himself transferred to a part
of his regiment that was in Burma--if that is the
right way to put it. She herself had an
interview, lasting a week or so--with Edward's
land-steward. She made him understand that the
estate would have to yield up to its last penny.
Before they left for India she had let Branshaw
for seven years at a thousand a year. She sold
two Vandykes and a little silver for eleven
thousand pounds and she raised, on mortgage,
twenty-nine thousand. That went to Edward's
money-lending friends in Monte Carlo. So she had
to get the twenty-nine thousand back, for she did
not regard the Vandykes and the silver as things
she would have to replace. They were just frills
to the Ashburnham vanity. Edward cried for two
days over the disappearance of his ancestors and
then she wished she had not done it; but it did
not teach her anything and it lessened such esteem
as she had for him. She did not also understand
that to let Branshaw affected him with a feeling
of physical soiling--that it was almost as bad for
him as if a woman belonging to him had become a
prostitute. That was how it did affect him; but I
dare say she felt just as bad about the Spanish
dancer.

So she went at it. They were eight years in
India, and during the whole of that time she
insisted that they must be self-supporting--they
had to live on his Captain's pay, plus the extra
allowance for being at the front. She gave him
the five hundred a year for Ashburnham frills, as
she called it to herself--and she considered she
was doing him very well.

Indeed, in a way, she did him very well--but it
was not his way. She was always buying him
expensive things which, as it were, she took off
her own back. I have, for instance, spoken of
Edward's leather cases. Well, they were not
Edward's at all; they were Leonora's
manifestations. He liked to be clean, but he
preferred, as it were, to be threadbare. She
never understood that, and all that pigskin was
her idea of a reward to him for putting her up to
a little speculation by which she made eleven
hundred pounds. She did, herself, the threadbare
business. When they went up to a place called
Simla, where, as I understand, it is cool in the
summer and very social--when they went up to Simla
for their healths it was she who had him prancing
around, as we should say in the United States, on
a thousand-dollar horse with the gladdest of glad
rags all over him. She herself used to go into
"retreat". I believe that was very good
for her health and it was also very
inexpensive.

It was probably also very good for Edward's
health, because he pranced about mostly with Mrs
Basil, who was a nice woman and very, very kind to
him. I suppose she was his mistress, but I never
heard it from Edward, of course. I seem to gather
that they carried it on in a high romantic
fashion, very proper to both of them--or, at any
rate, for Edward; she seems to have been a tender
and gentle soul who did what he wanted. I do not
mean to say that she was without character; that
was her job, to do what Edward wanted. So I
figured it out, that for those five years, Edward
wanted long passages of deep affection kept up in
long, long talks and that every now and then they
"fell," which would give Edward an
opportunity for remorse and an excuse to lend the
Major another fifty. I don't think that Mrs Basil
considered it to be "falling"; she just
pitied him and loved him.

You see, Leonora and Edward had to talk about
something during all these years. You cannot be
absolutely dumb when you live with a person unless
you are an inhabitant of the North of England or
the State of Maine. So Leonora imagined the
cheerful device of letting him see the accounts of
his estate and discussing them with him. He did
not discuss them much; he was trying to behave
prettily. But it was old Mr Mumford--the farmer
who did not pay his rent--that threw Edward into
Mrs Basil's arms. Mrs Basil came upon Edward in
the dusk, in the Burmese garden, with all sorts of
flowers and things. And he was cutting up that
crop--with his sword, not a walking-stick. He was
also carrying on and cursing in a way you would
not believe.

She ascertained that an old gentleman called
Mumford had been ejected from his farm and had
been given a little cottage rent-free, where he
lived on ten shillings a week from a farmers'
benevolent society, supplemented by seven that was
being allowed him by the Ashburnham trustees.
Edward had just discovered that fact from the
estate accounts. Leonora had left them in his
dressing-room and he had begun to read them before
taking off his marching-kit. That was how he came
to have a sword. Leonora considered that she had
been unusually generous to old Mr Mumford in
allowing him to inhabit a cottage, rent-free, and
in giving him seven shillings a week. Anyhow, Mrs
Basil had never seen a man in such a state as
Edward was. She had been passionately in love
with him for quite a time, and he had been longing
for her sympathy and admiration with a passion as
deep. That was how they came to speak about it,
in the Burmese garden, under the pale sky, with
sheaves of severed vegetation, misty and odorous,
in the night around their feet. I think they
behaved themselves with decorum for quite a time
after that, though Mrs Basil spent so many hours
over the accounts of the Ashburnham estate that
she got the name of every field by heart. Edward
had a huge map of his lands in his harness-room
and Major Basil did not seem to mind. I believe
that people do not mind much in lonely stations.

It might have lasted for ever if the Major had
not been made what is called a brevet-colonel
during the shuffling of troops that went on just
before the South African War. He was sent off
somewhere else and, of course, Mrs Basil could not
stay with Edward. Edward ought, I suppose, to
have gone to the Transvaal. It would have done
him a great deal of good to get killed. But
Leonora would not let him; she had heard awful
stories of the extravagance of the hussar regiment
in war-time--how they left hundred-bottle cases of
champagne, at five guineas a bottle, on the veldt
and so on. Besides, she preferred to see how
Edward was spending his five hundred a year. I
don't mean to say that Edward had any grievance in
that. He was never a man of the deeds of heroism
sort and it was just as good for him to be sniped
at up in the hills of the North Western frontier,
as to be shot at by an old gentleman in a tophat
at the bottom of some spruit. Those are more or
less his words about it. I believe he quite
distinguished himself over there. At any rate, he
had had his D.S.O. and was made a brevet-major.
Leonora, however, was not in the least keen on his
soldiering. She hated also his deeds of heroism.
One of their bitterest quarrels came after he had,
for the second time, in the Red Sea, jumped
overboard from the troopship and rescued a private
soldier. She stood it the first time and even
complimented him. But the Red Sea was awful, that
trip, and the private soldiers seemed to develop a
suicidal craze. It got on Leonora's nerves; she
figured Edward, for the rest of that trip, jumping
overboard every ten minutes. And the mere cry of
"Man overboard" is a disagreeable,
alarming and disturbing thing. The ship gets
stopped and there are all sorts of shouts. And
Edward would not promise not to do it again,
though, fortunately, they struck a streak of
cooler weather when they were in the Persian Gulf.
Leonora had got it into her head that Edward was
trying to commit suicide, so I guess it was pretty
awful for her when he would not give the promise.
Leonora ought never to have been on that
troopship; but she got there somehow, as an
economy.

Major Basil discovered his wife's relation with
Edward just before he was sent to his other
station. I don't know whether that was a
blackmailer's adroitness or just a trick of
destiny. He may have known of it all the time or
he may not. At any rate, he got hold of, just
about then, some letters and things. It cost
Edward three hundred pounds immediately. I do not
know how it was arranged; I cannot imagine how
even a blackmailer can make his demands. I suppose
there is some sort of way of saving your face. I
figure the Major as disclosing the letters to
Edward with furious oaths, then accepting his
explanations that the letters were perfectly
innocent if the wrong construction were not put upon
them. Then the Major would say: "I say, old
chap, I'm deuced hard up. Couldn't you lend me
three hundred or so?" I fancy that was how it
was. And, year by year, after that there would
come a letter from the Major, saying that he was
deuced hard up and couldn't Edward lend him three
hundred or so?

Edward was pretty hard hit when Mrs Basil had
to go away. He really had been very fond of her,
and he remained faithful to her memory for quite a
long time. And Mrs Basi had loved him very much
and continued to cherish a hope of reunion with
him. Three days ago there came a quite proper but
very lamentable letter from her to Leonora, asking
to be given particulars as to Edward's death. She
had read the advertisement of it in an Indian
paper. I think she must have been a very nice
woman. . . .

And then the Ashburnhams were moved somewhere
up towards a place or a district called Chitral.
I am no good at geography of the Indian Empire.
By that time they had settled down into a model
couple and they never spoke in private to each
other. Leonora had given up even showing the
accounts of the Ashburnham estate to Edward. He
thought that that was because she had piled up
such a lot of money that she did not want him to
know how she was getting on any more. But, as a
matter of fact, after five or six years it had
penetrated to her mind that it was painful to
Edward to have to look on at the accounts of his
estate and have no hand in the management of it.
She was trying to do him a kindness. And, up in
Chitral, poor dear little Maisie Maidan came
along. . . .

That was the most unsettling to Edward of all
his affairs. It made him suspect that he was
inconstant. The affair with the Dolciquita he had
sized up as a short attack of madness like
hydrophobia. His relations with Mrs Basil had not
seemed to him to imply moral turpitude of a gross
kind. The husband had been complaisant; they had
really loved each other; his wife was very cruel
to him and had long ceased to be a wife to him.
He thought that Mrs Basil had been his soul-mate,
separated from him by an unkind fate--something
sentimental of that sort.

But he discovered that, whilst he was still
writing long weekly letters to Mrs Basil, he was
beginning to be furiously impatient if he missed
seeing Maisie Maidan during the course of the day.
He discovered himself watching the doorways with
impatience; he discovered that he disliked her boy
husband very much for hours at a time. He
discovered that he was getting up at unearthly
hours in order to have time, later in the morning,
to go for a walk with Maisie Maidan. He
discovered himself using little slang words that
she used and attaching a sentimental value to
those words. These, you understand, were
discoveries that came so late that he could do
nothing but drift. He was losing weight; his eyes
were beginning to fall in; he had touches of bad
fever. He was, as he described it, pipped.

And, one ghastly hot day, he suddenly heard
himself say to Leonora:

"I say, couldn't we take Mrs Maidan with
us to Europe and drop her at Nauheim?"

He hadn't had the least idea of saying that to
Leonora. He had merely been standing, looking at
an illustrated paper, waiting for dinner. Dinner
was twenty minutes late or the Ashburnhams would
not have been alone together. No, he hadn't had
the least idea of framing that speech. He had
just been standing in a silent agony of fear, of
longing, of heat, of fever. He was thinking that
they were going back to Branshaw in a month and
that Maisie Maidan was going to remain behind and
die. And then, that had come out.

The punkah swished in the darkened room;
Leonora lay exhausted and motionless in her cane
lounge; neither of them stirred. They were both
at that time very ill in indefinite ways.

And then Leonora said:

"Yes. I promised it to Charlie Maidan
this afternoon. I have offered to pay her ex's
myself."

Edward just saved himself from saying:
"Good God!" You see, he had not the
least idea of what Leonora knew--about Maisie,
about Mrs Basil, even about La Dolciquita. It was
a pretty enigmatic situation for him. It struck
him that Leonora must be intending to manage his
loves as she managed his money affairs and it made
her more hateful to him--and more worthy of
respect.

Leonora, at any rate, had managed his money to
some purpose. She had spoken to him, a week
before, for the first time in several years--about
money. She had made twenty-two thousand pounds
out of the Branshaw land and seven by the letting
of Branshaw furnished. By fortunate
investments--in which Edward had helped her--she had made
another six or seven thousand that might well
become more. The mortgages were all paid off, so
that, except for the departure of the two Vandykes
and the silver, they were as well off as they had
been before the Dolciquita had acted the locust.
It was Leonora's great achievement. She laid the
figures before Edward, who maintained an unbroken
silence.

"I propose," she said, "that you
should resign from the Army and that we should go
back to Branshaw. We are both too ill to stay
here any longer."

Edward said nothing at all.

"This," Leonora continued
passionlessly, "is the great day of my
life."

Edward said:

"You have managed the job amazingly. You
are a wonderful woman." He was thinking that
if they went back to Branshaw they would leave
Maisie Maidan behind. That thought occupied him
exclusively. They must, undoubtedly, return to
Branshaw; there could be no doubt that Leonora was
too ill to stay in that place. She said:

"You understand that the management of the
whole of the expenditure of the income will be in
your hands. There will be five thousand a
year."

She thought that he cared very much about the
expenditure of an income of five thousand a year
and that the fact that she had done so much for
him would rouse in him some affection for her.
But he was thinking exclusively of Maisie
Maidan--of Maisie, thousands of miles away from
him. He was seeing the mountains between
them--blue mountains and the sea and sunlit
plains. He said:

"That is very generous of you." And
she did not know whether that were praise or a
sneer. That had been a week before. And all that
week he had passed in an increasing agony at the
thought that those mountains, that sea, and those
sunlit plains would be between him and Maisie
Maidan. That thought shook him in the burning
nights: the sweat poured from him and he trembled
with cold, in the burning noons--at that thought.
He had no minute's rest; his bowels turned round
and round within him: his tongue was perpetually
dry and it seemed to him that the breath between
his teeth was like air from a pest-house.

He gave no thought to Leonora at all; he had
sent in his papers. They were to leave in a
month. It seemed to him to be his duty to leave
that place and to go away, to support Leonora. He
did his duty.

It was horrible, in their relationship at that
time, that
whatever she did caused him to hate her. He
hated her when he found that she proposed to set
him up as the Lord of Branshaw again--as a sort of
dummy lord, in swaddling clothes. He imagined
that she had done this in order to separate him
from Maisie Maidan. Hatred hung in all the heavy
nights and filled the shadowy corners of the room.
So when he heard that she had offered to the
Maidan boy to take his wife to Europe with him,
automatically he hated her since he hated all that
she did. It seemed to him, at that time, that she
could never be other than cruel even if, by
accident, an act of hers were kind. . . . Yes,
it was a horrible situation.

But the cool breezes of the ocean seemed to
clear up that hatred as if it had been a curtain.
They seemed to give him back admiration for her,
and respect. The agreeableness of having money
lavishly at command, the fact that it had bought
for him the companionship of Maisie Maidan--these
things began to make him see that his wife might
have been right in the starving and scraping upon
which she had insisted. He was at ease; he was
even radiantly happy when he carried cups of
bouillon for Maisie Maidan along the deck. One
night, when he was leaning beside Leonora, over
the ship's side, he said suddenly:

"By jove, you're the finest woman in the
world. I wish we could be better
friends."

She just turned away without a word and went to
her cabin. Still, she was very much better in
health.

And now, I suppose, I must give you Leonora's
side of the case. . . .

That is very difficult. For Leonora, if she
preserved an unchanged front, changed very
frequently her point of view. She had been
drilled-- in her tradition, in her upbringing--to
keep her mouth shut. But there were times, she
said, when she was so near yielding to the
temptation of speaking that afterwards she
shuddered to think of those times. You must
postulate that what she desired above all things
was to keep a shut mouth to the world; to Edward
and to the women that he loved. If she spoke she
would despise herself.

From the moment of his unfaithfulness with La
Dolciquita she never acted the part of wife to
Edward. It was not that she intended to keep
herself from him as a principle, for ever. Her
spiritual advisers, I believe, forbade that. But
she stipulated that he must, in some way, perhaps
symbolical, come back to her. She was not very
clear as to what she meant; probably she did not
know herself. Or perhaps she did.

There were moments when he seemed to be coming
back to her; there were moments when she was
within a hair of yielding to her physical passion
for him. In just the same way, at moments, she
almost yielded to the temptation to denounce Mrs
Basil to her husband or Maisie Maidan to hers.
She desired then to cause the horrors and pains of
public scandals. For, watching Edward more
intently and with more straining of ears than that
which a cat bestows upon a bird overhead, she was
aware of the progress of his passion for each of
these ladies. She was aware of it from the way in
which his eyes returned to doors and gateways; she
knew from his tranquillities when he had received
satisfactions.

At times she imagined herself to see more than
was warranted. She imagined that Edward was
carrying on intrigues with other women--with two
at once; with three. For whole periods she
imagined him to be a monster of libertinage and
she could not see that he could have anything
against her. She left him his liberty; she was
starving herself to build up his fortunes; she
allowed herself none of the joys of femininity--no
dresses, no jewels--hardly even friendships, for
fear they should cost money.

And yet, oddly, she could not but be aware that
both Mrs Basil and Maisie Maidan were nice women.
The curious, discounting eye which one woman can
turn on another did not prevent her seeing that Mrs
Basil was very good to Edward and Mrs Maidan very
good for him. That seemed her to be a monstrous
and incomprehensible working of Fate's.
Incomprehensible! Why, she asked herself again and
again, did none of the good deeds that she did for
her husband ever come through to him, or appear to
hime as good deeds? By what trick of mania could
not he let her be as good to him as Mrs Basil was?
Mrs Basil was not so extraordinarily dissimilar to
herself. She was, it was true, tall, dark, with
soft mournful voice and a great kindness of manner
for every created thing, from punkah men to
flowers on the trees. But she was not so well
read as Lenora, at any rate in learned books.
Leonora could not stand novels. But, even with all
her differences, Mrs Basil did not appear to
Leonora to differ so very much from herself. She
was truthful, honest and, for the rest, just a
woman. And Leonora had a vague sort of idea that,
to a man, all women are the same after three weeks
of close intercourse. She thought that the
kindness should no longer appeal, the soft and
mournful voice no longer thrill, the tall darkness
no longer give a man the illusion that he was going
into the depths of an unexplored wood. She could
not understand how Edward could go on and on
maundering over Mrs Basil. She could not see why
he should continue to write her long letters after
their separation. After that, indeed, she had a
very bad time.

She had at that period what I will call the
"monstrous" theory of Edward. She was
always imagining him ogling at every woman that he
came across. She did not, that year, go into
"retreat" at Simla because she was
afraid that he would corrupt her maid in her
absence. She imagined him carrying on intrigues
with native women or Eurasians. At dances she was
in a fever of watchfulness.

She persuaded herself that this was because she
had a dread of scandals. Edward might get himself
mixed up with a marriageable daughter of some man
who would make a row or some husband who would
matter. But, really, she acknowledged afterwards
to herself, she was hoping that, Mrs Basil being
out of the way, the time might have come when
Edward should return to her. All that period she
passed in an agony of jealousy and fear--the fear
that Edward might really become promiscuous in his
habits.

So that, in an odd way, she was glad when
Maisie Maidan came along--and she realized that
she had not, before, been afraid of husbands and
of scandals, since, then, she did her best to keep
Maisie's husband unsuspicious. She wished to
appear so trustful of Edward that Maidan could not
possibly have any suspicions. It was an evil
position for her. But Edward was very ill and she
wanted to see him smile again. She thought that
if he could smile again through her agency he
might return, through gratitude and satisfied
love--to her. At that time she thought that
Edward was a person of light and fleeting
passions. And she could understand Edward's
passion for Maisie, since Maisie was one of those
women to whom other women will allow magnetism.

She was very pretty; she was very young; in
spite of her heart she was very gay and light on
her feet. And Leonora was really very fond of
Maisie, who was fond enough of Leonora. Leonora,
indeed, imagined that she could manage this affair
all right. She had no thought of Maisie's being
led into adultery; she imagined that if she could
take Maisie and Edward to Nauheim, Edward would
see enough of her to get tired of her pretty
little chatterings, and of the pretty little
motions of her hands and feet. And she thought
she could trust Edward. For there was not any
doubt of Maisie's passion for Edward. She raved
about him to Leonora as Leonora had heard girls
rave about drawing masters in schools. She was
perpetually asking her boy husband why he could
not dress, ride, shoot, play polo, or even recite
sentimental poems, like their major. And young
Maidan had the greatest admiration for Edward, and
he adored, was bewildered by and entirely trusted
his wife. It appeared to him that Edward was
devoted to Leonora. And Leonora imagined that
when poor Maisie was cured of her hear and Edward
had seen enough of her, he would return to her.
She had the vague, passionate idea that, when
Edward had exhausted a number of other types of
women he must turn to her. Why should not her type
have its turn in his heart? She imagined that, by
now, she understood him better, that she
understood better his vanities and that, by making
him happier, she could arouse his love.

I

I HAVE, I am aware, told this story in a very
rambling way so that it may be difficult for
anyone to find their path through what may be a
sort of maze. I cannot help it. I have stuck to
my idea of being in a country cottage with a
silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the
wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the
story as it comes. And, when one discusses an
affair--a long, sad affair--one goes back, one
goes forward. One remembers points that one has
forgotten and one explains them all the more
minutely since one recognizes that one has
forgotten to mention them in their proper places
and that one may have given, by omitting them, a
false impression. I console myself with thinking
that this is a real story and that, after all,
real stories are probably told best in the way a
person telling a story would tell them. They will
then seem most real.

At any rate, I think I have brought my story up
to the date of Maisie Maidan's death. I mean that
I have explained everything that went before it
from the several points of view that were
necessary--from Leonora's, from Edward's and, to
some extent, from my own. You have the facts for
the trouble of finding them; you have the points
of view as far as I could ascertain or put them.
Let me imagine myself back, then, at the day of
Maisie's death--or rather at the moment of
Florence's dissertation on the Protest, up in the
old Castle of the town of M----. Let us consider
Leonora's point of view with regard to Florence;
Edward's, of course, I cannot give you, for Edward
naturally never spoke of his affair with my wife.
(I may, in what follows, be a little hard on
Florence; but you must remember that I have been
writing away at this story now for six months and
reflecting longer and longer upon these affairs.)

And the longer I think about them the more
certain I become that Florence was a contaminating
influence--she depressed and deteriorated poor
Edward; she deteriorated, hopelessly, the
miserable Leonora. There is no doubt that she
caused Leonora's character to deteriorate. If
there was a fine point about Leonora it was that
she was proud and that she was silent. But that
pride and that silence broke when she made that
extraordinary outburst, in the shadowy room that
contained the Protest, and in the little terrace
looking over the river. I don't mean to say that
she was doing a wrong thing. She was certainly
doing right in trying to warn me that Florence was
making eyes at her husband. But, if she did the
right thing, she was doing it in the wrong way.
Perhaps she should have reflected longer; she
should have spoken, if she wanted to speak, only
after reflection. Or it would have been better if
she had acted--if, for instance, she had so
chaperoned Florence that private communication
between her and Edward became impossible. She
should have gone eavesdropping; she should have
watched outside bedroom doors. It is odious; but
that is the way the job is done. She should have
taken Edward away the moment Maisie was dead. No,
she acted wrongly. . . . And yet, poor thing,
is it for me to condemn her--and what did it
matter in the end? If it had not been Florence,
it would have been some other . . . Still, it
might have been a better woman than my wife. For
Florence was vulgar; Florence was a common flirt
who would not, at the last, lacher prise; and
Florence was an unstoppable talker. You could not
stop her; nothing would stop her. Edward and
Leonora were at least proud and reserved people.
Pride and reserve are not the only things in life;
perhaps they are not even the best things. But if
they happen to be your particular virtues you will
go all to pieces if you let them go. And Leonora
let them. go. She let them go before poor Edward
did even. Consider her position when she burst
out over the Luther-Protest. . . . Consider
her agonies. . . .

You are to remember that the main passion of
her life was to get Edward back; she had never,
till that moment, despaired of getting him back.
That may seem ignoble; but you have also to
remember that her getting him back represented to
her not only a victory for herself. It would, as
it appeared to her, have been a victory for all
wives and a victory for her Church. That was how
it presented itself to her. These things are a
little inscrutable. I don't know why the getting
back of Edward should have represented to her a
victory for all wives, for Society and for her
Church. Or, maybe, I have a glimmering of it.

She saw life as a perpetual sex-baffle between
husbands who desire to be unfaithful to their
wives, and wives who desire to recapture their
husbands in the end. That was her sad and modest
view of matrimony. Man, for her, was a sort of
brute who must have his divagations, his moments
of excess, his nights out, his, let us say,
rutting seasons. She had read few novels, so that
the idea of a pure and constant love succeeding
the sound of wedding bells had never been very
much presented to her. She went, numbed and
terrified, to the Mother Superior of her
childhood's convent with the tale of Edward's
infidelities with the Spanish dancer, and all that
the old nun, who appeared to her to be infinitely
wise, mystic and reverend, had done had been to
shake her head sadly and to say:

"Men are like that. By the blessing of
God it will all come right in the end."

That was what was put before her by her
spiritual advisers as her programme in life. Or,
at any rate, that was how their teachings came
through to her--that was the lesson she told me
she had learned of them. I don't know exactly
what they taught her. The lot of women was
patience and patience and again patience--ad
majorem Dei gloriam--until upon the appointed day,
if God saw fit, she should have her reward. If
then, in the end, she should have succeeded in
getting Edward back she would have kept her man
within the limits that are all that wifehood has
to expect. She was even taught that such excesses
in men are natural, excusable--as if they had been
children.

And the great thing was that there should be no
scandal before the congregation. So she had clung
to the idea of getting Edward back with a fierce
passion that was like an agony. She had looked
the other way; she had occupied herself solely
with one idea. That was the idea of having Edward
appear, when she did get him back, wealthy,
glorious as it were, on account of his lands, and
upright. She would show, in fact, that in an
unfaithful world one Catholic woman had succeeded
in retaining the fidelity of her husband. And she
thought she had come near her desires.

Her plan with regard to Maisie had appeared to
be working admirably. Edward had seemed to be
cooling off towards the girl. He did not hunger
to pass every minute of the time at Nauheirn
beside the child's recumbent form; he went out to
polo matches; he played auction bridge in the
evenings; he was cheerful and bright. She was
certain that he was not trying to seduce that poor
child; she was beginning to think that he had
never tried to do so. He seemed in fact to be
dropping back into what he had been for Maisie in
the beginning--a kind, attentive, superior officer
in the regiment, paying gallant attentions to a
bride. They were as open in their little
flirtations as the dayspring from on high. And
Maisie had not appeared to fret when he went off
on excursions with us; she had to lie down for so
many hours on her bed every afternoon, and she had
not appeared to crave for the attentions of Edward
at those times. And Edward was beginning to make
little advances to Leonora. Once or twice, in
private--for he often did it before people--he had
said: "How nice you look!" or "What
a pretty dress!" She had gone with Florence
to Frankfurt, where they dress as well as in
Paris, and had got herself a gown or two. She
could afford it, and Florence was an excellent
adviser as to dress. She seemed to have got hold
of the clue to the riddle.

Yes, Leonora seemed to have got hold of the
clue to the riddle. She imagined herself to have
been in the wrong to some extent in the past. She
should not have kept Edward on such a tight rein
with regard to money. She thought she was on the
right tack in letting him--as she had done only
with fear and irresolution--have again the control
of bis income. He came even a step towards her
and acknowledged, spontaneously, that she had been
right in husbanding, for all those years, their
resources. He said to her one day:

"You've done right, old girl. There's
nothing I like so much as to have a little to
chuck away. And I can do it, thanks to
you."

That was really, she said, the happiest moment
of her life. And he, seeming to realize it, had
ventured to pat her on the shoulder. He had,
ostensibly, come in to borrow a safety-pin of her.
And the occasion of her boxing Maisie's ears, had,
after it was over, riveted in her mind the idea
that there was no intrigue between Edward and Mrs
Maidan. She imagined that, from henceforward, all
that she had to do was to keep him well supplied
with money and his mind amused with pretty girls.
She was convinced that he was coming back to her.
For that month she no longer repelled his timid
advances that never went very far. For he
certainly made timid advances. He patted her on
the shoulder; he whispered into her ear little
jokes about the odd figures that they saw up at
the Casino. It was not much to make a little
joke--but the whispering of it was a precious
intimacy. . . .

And then--smash--it all went. It went to
pieces at the moment when Florence laid her hand
upon Edward's wrist, as it lay on the glass
sheltering the manuscript of the Protest, up in
the high tower with the shutters where the
sunlight here and there streamed in. Or, rather,
it went when she noticed the look in Edward's eyes
as he gazed back into Florence's. She knew that
look.

She had known--since the first moment of their
meeting, since the moment of our all sitting down
to dinner together--that
Florence was making eyes at Edward. But
she had seen so many women make eyes at
Edward--hundreds and hundreds of women, in railway
trains, in hotels, aboard liners, at street
corners. And she had arrived at thinking that
Edward took little stock in women that made eyes
at him. She had formed what was, at that time, a
fairly correct estimate of the methods of, the
reasons for, Edward's loves. She was certain that
hitherto they had consisted of the short passion
for the Dolciquita, the real sort of love for Mrs
Basil, and what she deemed the pretty courtship of
Maisie Maidan. Besides she despised Florence so
haughtily that she could not imagine Edward's
being attracted by her. And she and Maisie were a
sort of bulwark round him. She wanted, besides,
to keep her eyes on Florence--for Florence knew
that she had boxed Maisie's ears. And Leonora
desperately desired that her union with Edward
should appear to be flawless. But all that went.
. . .

With the answering gaze of Edward into
Florence's blue and uplifted eyes, she knew that
it had all gone. She knew that that gaze meant
that those two had had long conversations of an
intimate kind--about their likes and dislikes,
about their natures, about their views of
marriage. She knew what it meant that she, when
we all four walked out together, had always been
with me ten yards ahead of Florence and Edward.
She did not imagine that it had gone further than
talks about their likes and dislikes, about their
natures or about marriage as an institution. But,
having watched Edward all her life, she knew that
that laying on of hands, that answering of gaze
with gaze, meant that the thing was unavoidable.
Edward was such a serious person.

She knew that any attempt on her part to
separate those two would be to rivet on Edward an
irrevocable passion; that, as I have before told
you, it was a trick of Edward's nature to believe
that the seducing of a woman gave her an
irrevocable hold over him for life. And that
touching of hands, she knew, would give that woman
an irrevocable claim--to be seduced. And she so
despised Florence that she would have preferred it
to be a parlour-maid. There are very decent
parlour-maids.

And, suddenly, there came into her mind the
conviction that Maisie Maidan had a real passion
for Edward; that this would break her heart--and
that she, Leonora, would be responsible for that.
She went, for the moment, mad. She clutched me by
the wrist; she dragged me down those stairs and
across that whispering Rittersaal with the high
painted pillars, the high painted chimney-piece.
I guess she did not go mad enough.

She ought to have said:

"Your wife is a harlot who is going to be
my husband's mistress . . ." That might
have done the trick. But, even in her madness,
she was afraid to go as far as that. She was
afraid that, if she did, Edward and Florence would
make a bolt of it, and that, if they did that, she
would lose forever all chance of getting him back
in the end. She acted very badly to me.

Well, she was a tortured soul who put her
Church before the interests of a Philadelphia
Quaker. That is all right--I daresay the Church
of Rome is the more important of the two.

A week after Maisie Maidan's death she was
aware that Florence had become Edward's mistress.
She waited outside Florence's door and met Edward
as he came away. She said nothing and he only
grunted. But I guess he had a bad time.

Yes, the mental deterioration that Florence
worked in Leonora was extraordinary; it smashed up
her whole life and all her chances. It made her,
in the first place, hopeless--for she could not
see how, after that, Edward could return to
her--after a vulgar intrigue with a vulgar woman.
His affair with Mrs Basil, which was now all that
she had to bring, in her heart, against him, she
could not find it in her to call an intrigue. It
was a love affair--a pure enough thing in its way.
But this seemed to her to be a horror--a
wantonness, all the more detestable to her,
because she so detested Florence. And Florence
talked. . . .

That was what was terrible, because Florence
forced Leonora herself to abandon her high
reserve--Florence and the situation. It appears
that Florence was in two minds whether to confess
to me or to Leonora. Confess she had to. And she
pitched at last on Leonora, because if it had been
me she would have had to confess a great deal
more. Or, at least, I might have guessed a great
deal more, about her "heart", and about
Jimmy. So she went to Leonora one day and began
hinting and hinting. And she enraged Leonora to
such an extent that at last Leonora said:

"You want to tell me that you are Edward's
mistress. You can be. I have no use for
him."

That was really a calamity for Leonora,
because, once started, there was no stopping the
talking. She tried to stop--but it was not to be
done. She found it necessary to send Edward
messages through Florence; for she would not speak
to him. She had to give him, for instance, to
understand that if I ever came to know of his
intrigue she would ruin him beyond repair. And it
complicated matters a good deal that Edward, at
about this time, was really a little in love with
her. He thought that he had treated her so badly;
that she was so fine. She was so mournful that he
longed to comfort her, and he thought himself such
a blackguard that there was nothing he would not
have done to make amends. And Florence
communicated these items of information to
Leonora.

I don't in the least blame Leonora for her
coarseness to Florence; it must have done Florence
a world of good. But I do blame her for giving
way to what was in the end a desire for
communicativeness. You see that business cut her
off from her Church. She did not want to confess
what she was doing because she was afraid that her
spiritual advisers would blame her for deceiving
me. I rather imagine that she would have
preferred damnation to breaking my heart. That is
what it works out at. She need not have troubled.

But, having no priests to talk to, she had to
talk to someone, and as Florence insisted on
talking to her, she talked back, in short,
explosive sentences, like one of the damned.
Precisely like one of the damned. Well, if a
pretty period in hell on this earth can spare her
any period of pain in Eternity--where there are
not any periods--I guess Leonora will escape hell
fire.

Her conversations with Florence would be like
this. Florence would happen in on her, whilst she
was doing her wonderful hair, with a proposition
from Edward, who seems about that time to have
conceived the naïve idea that he might become
a polygamist. I daresay it was Florence who put
it into his head. Anyhow, I am not responsible
for the oddities of the human psychology. But it
certainly appears that at about that date Edward
cared more for Leonora than he had ever done
before--or, at any rate, for a long time. And, if
Leonora had been a person to play cards and if she
had played her cards well, and if she had had no
sense of shame and so on, she might then have
shared Edward with Florence until the time came
for jerking that poor cuckoo out of the nest.

Well, Florence would come to Leonora with some
such proposition. I do not mean to say that she
put it baldly, like that. She stood out that she
was not Edward's mistress until Leonora said that
she had seen Edward coming out of her room at an
advanced hour of the night. That checked Florence
a bit; but she fell back upon her
"heart" and stuck out that she had
merely been conversing with Edward in order to
bring him to a better frame of mind. Florence
had, of course, to stick to that story; for even
Florence would not have had the face to implore
Leonora to grant her favours to Edward if she had
admitted that she was Edward's mistress. That
could not be done. At the same time Florence had
such a pressing desire to talk about something.
There would have been nothing else to talk about
but a rapprochement between that estranged pair.
So Florence would go on babbling and Leonora would
go on brushing her hair. And then Leonora would
say suddenly something like:

"I should think myself defiled if Edward
touched me now that he has touched you."

That would discourage Florence a bit; but after
a week or so, on another morning she would have
another try.

And even in other things Leonora deteriorated.
She had promised Edward to leave the spending of
his own income in his own hands. And she had
fully meant to do that. I daresay she would have
done it too; though, no doubt, she would have
spied upon his banking account in secret. She was
not a Roman Catholic for nothing. But she took so
serious a view of Edward's unfaithfulness to the
memory of poor little Maisie that she could not
trust him any more at all .

So when she got back to Branshaw she started,
after less than a month, to worry him about the
minutest items of his expenditure. She allowed
him to draw his own cheques, but there was hardly
a cheque that she did not scrutinize--except for a
private account of about five hundred a year
which, tacitly, she allowed him to keep for
expenditure on his mistress or mistresses. He had
to have his jaunts to Paris; he had to send
expensive cables in cipher to Florence about twice
a week. But she worried him about his expenditure
on wines, on fruit trees, on harness, on gates, on
the account at his blacksmith's for work done to a
new patent Army stirrup that he was trying to
invent. She could not see why he should bother to
invent a new Army stirrup, and she was really
enraged when, after the invention was mature, he
made a present to the War Office of the designs
and the patent rights. It was a remarkably good
stirrup.

I have told you, I think, that Edward spent a
great deal of time, and about two hundred pounds
for law fees on getting a poor girl, the daughter
of one of his gardeners, acquitted of a charge of
murdering her baby. That was positively the last
act of Edward's life. It came at a time when
Nancy Rufford was on her way to India; when the
most horrible gloom was over the household; when
Edward himself was in an agony and behaving as
prettily as he knew how. Yet even then Leonora
made him a terrible scene about this expenditure
of time and trouble. She sort of had the vague
idea that what had passed with the girl and the
rest of it ought to have taught Edward a
lesson--the lesson of economy. She threatened to
take his banking account away from him again. I
guess that made him cut his throat. He might have
stuck it out otherwise--but the thought that he
had lost Nancy and that, in addition, there was
nothing left for him but a dreary, dreary
succession of days in which he could be of no
public service .
. . Well, it finished him.

It was during those years that Leonora tried to
get up a love affair of her own with a fellow
called Bayham--a decent sort of fellow. A really
nice man. But the affair was no sort of success.
I have told you about it already. . . .

II

WELL, that about brings me up to the date of my
receiving, in Waterbury, the laconic cable from
Edward to the effect that he wanted me to go to
Branshaw and have a chat. I was pretty busy at
the time and I was half minded to send him a reply
cable to the effect that I would start in a
fortnight. But I was having a long interview with
old Mr Hurlbird's attorneys and immediately
afterwards I had to have a long interview with the
Misses Hurlbird, so I delayed cabling.

I had expected to find the Misses Hurlbird
excessively old--in the nineties or thereabouts.
The time had passed so slowly that I had the
impression that it must have been thirty years
since I had been in the United States. It was
only twelve years. Actually Miss Hurlbird was
just sixty-one and Miss Florence Hurlbird
fifty-nine, and they were both, mentally and
physically, as vigorous as could be desired. They
were, indeed, more vigorous, mentally, than suited
my purpose, which was to get away from the United
States as quickly as I could. The Hurlbirds were
an exceedingly united family--exceedingly united
except on one set of points. Each of the three of
them had a separate doctor, whom they trusted
implicitly--and each had a separate attorney. And
each of them distrusted the other's doctor and the
other's attorney. And, naturally, the doctors and
the attorneys warned one all the time--against
each other. You cannot imagine how complicated it
all became for me. Of course I had an attorney of
my own--recommended to me by young Carter, my
Philadelphia nephew.

I do not mean to say that there was any
unpleasantness of a grasping kind. The problem
was quite another one--a moral dilemma. You see,
old Mr Hurlbird had left all his property to
Florence with the mere request that she would have
erected to him in the city of Waterbury, Ill., a
memorial that should take the form of some sort of
institution for the relief of sufferers from the
heart. Florence's money had all come to me-- and
with it old Mr Hurlbird's. He had died just five
days before Florence.

Well, I was quite ready to spend a round
million dollars on the relief of sufferers from
the heart. The old gentleman had left about a
million and a half; Florence had been worth about
eight hundred thousand--and as I figured it out, I
should cut up at about a million myself. Anyhow,
there was ample money. But I naturally wanted to
consult the wishes of his surviving relatives and
then the trouble really began. You see, it had
been discovered that Mr Hurlbird had had nothing
whatever the matter with his heart. His lungs had
been a little affected all through his life and he
had died of bronchitis. It struck Miss Florence
Hurlbird that, since her brother had died of lungs
and not of heart, his money ought to go to lung
patients. That, she considered, was what her
brother would have wished. On the other hand, by
a kink, that I could not at the time understand,
Miss Hurlbird insisted that I ought to keep the
money all to myself. She said that she did not
wish for any monuments to the Hurlbird family. At
the time I thought that that was because of a New
England dislike for necrological ostentation. But
I can figure out now, when I remember certain
insistent and continued questions that she put to
me, about Edward Ashburnham, that there was
another idea in her mind. And Leonora has told me
that, on Florence's dressing-table, beside her
dead body, there had lain a letter to Miss
Hurlbird--a letter which Leonora posted without
telling me. I don't know how Florence had time to
write to her aunt; but I can quite understand that
she would not like to go out of the world without
making some comments. So I guess Florence had
told Miss Hurlbird a good bit about Edward
Ashburnham in a few scrawled words--and that that
was why the old lady did not wish the name of
Hurlbird perpetuated. Perhaps also she thought
that I had earned the Hurlbird money. It meant a
pretty tidy lot of discussing, what with the
doctors warning each other about the bad effects
of discussions on the health of the old ladies,
and warning me covertly against each other, and
saying that old Mr Hurlbird might have died of
heart, after all, in spite of the diagnosis of
his
doctor. And the solicitors all had separate
methods of arranging about how the money should be
invested and entrusted and bound. Personally, I
wanted to invest the money so that the interest
could be used for the relief of sufferers from the
heart. If old Mr Hurlbird had not died of any
defects in that organ he had considered that it
was defective. Moreover, Florence had certainly
died of her heart, as I saw it. And when Miss
Florence Hurlbird stood out that the money ought
to go to chest sufferers I was brought to thinking
that there ought to be a chest institution too,
and I advanced the sum that I was ready to provide
to a million and a half of dollars. That would
have given seven hundred and fifty thousand to
each class of invalid. I did not want money at
all badly. All I wanted it for was to be able to
give Nancy Rufford a good time. I did not know
much about housekeeping expenses in England where,
I presumed, she would wish to live. I knew that
her needs at that time were limited to good
chocolates, and a good horse or two, and simple,
pretty frocks. Probably she would want more than
that later on. But even if I gave a million and a
half dollars to these institutions I should still
have the equivalent of about twenty thousand a
year English, and I considered that Nancy could
have a pretty good time on that or less. Anyhow,
we had a stiff set of arguments up at the Hurlbird
mansion which stands on a bluff over the town. It
may strike you, silent listener, as being funny if
you happen to be European. But moral problems of
that description and the giving of millions to
institutions are immensely serious matters in my
country. Indeed, they are the staple topics for
consideration amongst the wealthy classes. We
haven't got peerage and social climbing to occupy
us much, and decent people do not take interest in
politics or elderly people in sport. So that
there were real tears shed by both Miss Hurlbird
and Miss Florence before I left that city. I left
it quite abruptly. Four hours after Edward's
telegram came another from Leonora, saying:
"Yes, do come. You could be so
helpful." I simply told my attorney that
there was the million and a half; that he could
invest it as he liked, and that the purposes must
be decided by the Misses Hurlbird. I was, anyhow,
pretty well worn out by all the discussions. And,
as I have never heard yet from the Misses
Hurlbird, I rather think that Miss Hurlbird,
either by revelations or by moral force, has
persuaded Miss Florence that no memorial to their
names shall be erected in the city of Waterbury,
Conn. Miss Hurlbird wept dreadfully when she
heard that I was going to stay with the
Ashburnhams, but she did not make any comments. I
was aware, at that date, that her niece had been
seduced by that fellow Jimmy before I had married
her--but I contrived to produce on her the
impression that I thought Florence had been a
model wife. Why, at that date I still believed
that Florence had been perfectly virtuous after
her marriage to me. I had not figured it out that
she could have played it so low down as to
continue her intrigue with that fellow under my
roof. Well, I was a fool. But I did not think
much about Florence at that date. My mind was
occupied with what was happening at Branshaw. I
had got it into my head that the telegrams had
something to do with Nancy. It struck me that she
might have shown signs of forming an attachment
for some undesirable fellow and that Leonora wanted
me to come back and marry her out of harm's way.
That was what was pretty firmly in my mind. And
it remained in my mind for nearly ten days after
my arrival at that beautiful old place. Neither
Edward nor Leonora made any motion to talk to me
about anything other than the weather and the
crops. Yet, although there were several young
fellows about, I could not see that any one in
particular was distinguished by the girl's
preference. She certainly appeared illish and
nervous, except when she woke up to talk gay
nonsense to me. Oh, the pretty thing that she
was. . . .

I imagined that what must have happened was
that the undesirable young man had been forbidden
the place and that Nancy was fretting a little.

What had happened was just Hell. Leonora had
spoken to Nancy; Nancy had spoken to Edward;
Edward had spoken to Leonora--and they had talked
and talked. And talked. You have to imagine
horrible pictures of gloom and half lights, and
emotions running through silent nights--through
whole nights. You have to imagine my beautiful
Nancy appearing suddenly to Edward, rising up at
the foot of his bed, with her long hair falling,
like a split cone of shadow, in the glimmer of a
night-light that burned beside him. You have to
imagine her, a silent, a no doubt agonized figure,
like a spectre, suddenly offering herself to
him--to save his reason! And you have to imagine
his frantic refusal--and talk. And talk! My
God!

And yet, to me, living in the house, enveloped
with the charm of the quiet and ordered living,
with the silent, skilled servants whose mere
laying out of my dress clothes was like a
caress--to me who was hourly with them they
appeared like tender, ordered and devoted people,
smiling, absenting themselves at the proper
intervals; driving me to meets--just good people!
How the devil--how the devil do they do it?

At dinner one evening Leonora said--she had
just opened a telegram:

"Nancy will be going to India, tomorrow,
to be with her father."

No one spoke. Nancy looked at her plate;
Edward went on eating his pheasant. I felt very
bad; I imagined that it would be up to me to
propose to Nancy that evening. It appeared to me
to be queer that they had not given me any warning
of Nancy's departure--But I thought that that was
only English manners--some sort of delicacy that I
had not got the hang of. You must remember that
at that moment I trusted in Edward and Leonora and
in Nancy Rufford, and in the tranquility of
ancient haunts of peace, as I had trusted in my
mother's love. And that evening Edward spoke to
me.

What in the interval had happened had been
this:

Upon her return from Nauheim Leonora had
completely broken down--because she knew she
could trust Edward. That seems odd but, if you
know anything about breakdowns, you will know that
by the ingenious torments that fate prepares for
us, these things come as soon as, a strain having
relaxed, there is nothing more to be done. It is
after a husband's long illness and death that a
widow goes to pieces; it is at the end of a long
rowing contest that a crew collapses and lies
forward upon its oars. And that was what happened
to Leonora.

From certain tones in Edward's voice; from the
long, steady stare that he had given her from his
bloodshot eyes on rising from the dinner table in
the Nauheim hotel, she knew that, in the affair of
the poor girl, this was a case in which Edward's
moral scruples, or his social code, or his idea
that it would be playing it too low down,
rendered Nancy perfectly safe. The girl, she felt
sure, was in no danger at all from Edward. And in
that she was perfectly right. The smash was to
come from herself.

She relaxed; she broke; she drifted, at first
quickly, then with an increasing momentum, down
the stream of destiny. You may put it that,
having been cut off from the restraints of her
religion, for the first time in her life, she
acted along the lines of her instinctive desires.
I do not know whether to think that, in that she
was no longer herself; or that, having let loose
the bonds of her standards, her conventions and
her traditions, she was being, for the first time,
her own natural self. She was torn between her
intense, maternal love for the girl and an intense
jealousy of the woman who realizes that the man
she loves has met what appears to be the final
passion of his life. She was divided between an
intense disgust for Edward's weakness in
conceiving this passion, an intense pity for the
miseries that he was enduring, and a feeling
equally intense, but one that she hid from
herself--a feeling of respect for Edward's
determination to keep himself, in this particular
affair, unspotted.

And the human heart is a very mysterious thing.
It is impossible to say that Leonora, in acting as
she then did, was not filled with a sort of hatred
of Edward's final virtue. She wanted, I think, to
despise him. He was, she realized gone from her
for good. Then let him suffer, let him agonize;
let him, if possible, break and go to that Hell
that is the abode of broken resolves. She might
have taken a different line. It would have been
so easy to send the girl away to stay with some
friends; to have taken her away herself upon some
pretext or other. That would not have cured
things but it would have been the decent line, .
. . But, at that date, poor Leonora was incapable
of taking any line whatever.

She pitied Edward frightfully at one time--and
then she acted along the lines of pity; she
loathed him at another and then she acted as her
loathing dictated. She gasped, as a person dying
of tuberculosis gasps for air. She craved madly
for communication with some other human soul. And
the human soul that she selected was that of the
girl.

Perhaps Nancy was the only person that she
could have talked to. With her necessity for
reticences, with her coldness of manner, Leonora
had singularly few intimates. She had none at
all, with the exception of the Mrs Colonel Whelen,
who had advised her about the affair with La
Dolciquita, and the one or two religious, who had
guided her through life. The Colonel's wife was
at that time in Madeira; the religious she now
avoided. Her visitors' book had seven hundred
names in it; there was not a soul that she could
speak to. She was Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw
Teleragh.

She was the great Mrs Ashburnham of Branshaw
and she lay all day upon her bed in her
marvellous, light, airy bedroom with the chintzes
and the Chippendale and the portraits of deceased
Ashburnhams by Zoffany and Zucchero. When there
was a meet she would struggle up--supposing it
were within driving distance--and let Edward drive
her and the girl to the cross-roads or the country
house. She would drive herself back alone; Edward
would ride off with the girl. Ride Leonora could
not, that season--her head was too bad. Each
pace of her mare was an anguish.

But she drove with efficiency and precision;
she smiled at the Gimmers and Ffoulkes and the
Hedley Seatons. She threw with exactitude pennies
to the boys who opened gates for her; she sat
upright on the seat of the high dog-cart; she
waved her hands to Edward and Nancy as they rode
off with the hounds, and every one could hear her
clear, high voice, in the chilly weather, saying:

"Have a good time!"

Poor forlorn woman! . . .

There was, however, one spark of consolation.
It came from the fact that Rodney Bayham, of
Bayham, followed her always with his eyes. It had
been three years since she had tried her abortive
love-affair with him. Yet still, on the winter
mornings he would ride up to her shafts and just
say: "Good day," and look at her with
eyes that were not imploring, but seemed to say:
"You see, I am still, as the Germans say, A.
D.--at disposition."

It was a great consolation, not because she
proposed ever to take him up again, but because it
showed her that there was in the world one
faithful soul in riding-breeches. And it showed
her that she was not losing her looks.

And, indeed, she was not losing her looks. She
was forty, but she was as clean run as on the day
she had left the convent--as clear in outline, as
clear coloured in the hair, as dark blue in the
eyes. She thought that her looking-glass told her
this; but there are always the doubts. . . .
Rodney Bayham's eyes took them away.

It is very singular that Leonora should not
have aged at all. I suppose that there are some
types of beauty and even of youth made for the
embellishments that come with enduring sorrow.
That is too elaborately put. I mean that Leonora,
if everything had prospered, might have become too
hard and, maybe, overbearing. As it was she was
tuned down to appearing efficient--and yet
sympathetic. That is the rarest of all blends.
And yet I swear that Leonora, in her restrained
way, gave the impression of being intensely
sympathetic. When she listened to you she
appeared also to be listening to some sound that
was going on in the distance. But still, she
listened to you and took in what you said, which,
since the record of humanity is a record of
sorrows, was, as a rule, something sad.

I think that she must have taken Nancy through
many terrors of the night and many bad places of
the day. And that would account for the girl's
passionate love for the elder woman. For Nancy's
love for Leonora was an admiration that is
awakened in Catholics by their feeling for the
Virgin Mary and for various of the saints. It is
too little to say that the girl would have laid
her life at Leonora's feet. Well, she laid there
the offer of her virtue--and her reason. Those
were sufficient instalments of her life. It would
today be much better for Nancy Rufford if she were
dead.

Perhaps all these reflections are a nuisance;
but they crowd on me. I will try to tell the
story.

You see--when she came back from Nauheim
Leonora began to have her headaches--headaches
lasting through whole days, during which she could
speak no word and could bear to hear no sound.
And, day after day, Nancy would sit with her,
silent and motionless for hours, steeping
handkerchiefs in vinegar and water, and thinking
her own thoughts. It must have been very bad for
her--and her meals alone with Edward must have
been bad for her too--and beastly bad for Edward.
Edward, of course, wavered in his demeanour, What
else could he do? At times he would sit silent
and dejected over his untouched food. He would
utter nothing but monosyllables when Nancy spoke
to him. Then he was simply afraid of the girl
falling in love with him. At other times he would
take a little wine; pull himself together; attempt
to chaff Nancy about a stake and binder hedge that
her mare had checked at, or talk about the habits
of the Chitralis. That was when he was thinking
that it was rough on the poor girl that he should
have become a dull companion. He realized that
his talking to her in the park at Nauheim had done
her no harm.

But all that was doing a great deal of harm to
Nancy. It gradually opened her eyes to the fact
that Edward was a man with his ups and downs and
not an invariably gay uncle like a nice dog, a
trustworthy horse or a girl friend. She would
find him in attitudes of frightful dejection, sunk
into his armchair in the study that was half a
gun-room. She would notice through the open door
that his face was the face of an old, dead man,
when he had no one to talk to. Gradually it forced
itself upon her attention that there were profound
differences between the pair that she regarded a
her uncle and her aunt. It was a conviction that
came very slowly.

It began with Edward's giving an oldish horse
to a young fellow called Selmes. Selmes' father
had been ruined by fraudulent solicitor and the
Selmes family had had to sell their hunters. It
was a case that had excited a good deal of sympathy
in that part of the county. And Edward, meeting
the young man one day, unmounted, and seeing him
to be very unhappy, had offered to give him an old
Irish cob upon which he was riding. It was a
silly sort of thing to do really. The horse was
worth from thirty to forty pounds and Edward might
have known that the gift would upset his wife. But
Edward just had to comfort that unhappy young man
whose father he had known all his life. And what
made it all the worse was that young Selmes could
not afford to keep the horse even. Edward
recollected this, immediately after he had made
the offer, and said quickly:

"Of course I mean that you should stable
the horse at Branshaw until you have time to turn
round or want to sell him and get a
better."

Nancy went straight home and told all this to
Leonora who was lying down. She regarded it as a
splendid instance of Edward's quick consideration
for the feelings and the circumstances of the
distressed. She thought it would cheer Leonora
up--because it ought to cheer any woman up to know
that she had such a splendid husband. That was
the last girlish thought she ever had. For
Leonora, whose headache had left her collected
but miserably weak, turned upon her bed and
uttered words that were amazing to the girl:

"I wish to God," she said, "that
he was your husband, and not mine. We shall be
ruined. We shall be ruined. Am I never to have a
chance?" And suddenly Leonora burst into a
passion of tears. She pushed herself up from the
pillows with one elbow and sat there--crying,
crying, crying, with her face hidden in her hands
and the tears falling through her fingers.

The girl flushed, stammered and whimpered as if
she had been personally insulted.

"But if Uncle Edward . . ." she
began.

"That man," said Leonora, with an
extraordinary bitterness, "would give the
shirt off his back and off mine--and off yours to
any . . ." She could not finish the
sentence.

At that moment she had been feeling an
extraordinary hatred and contempt for her husband.
All the morning and all the afternoon she had been
lying there thinking that Edward and the girl were
together--in the field and hacking it home at
dusk. She had been digging her sharp nails into
her palms.

The house had been very silent in the drooping
winter weather. And then, after an eternity of
torture, there had invaded it the sound of opening
doors, of the girl's gay voice saying:

"Well, it was only under the
mistletoe." . . .
And there was Edward's gruff undertone. Then
Nancy had come in, with feet that had hastened up
the stairs and that tiptoed as they approached the
open door of Leonora's room. Branshaw had a great
big hall with oak floors and tiger skins. Round
this hall there ran a gallery upon which Leonora's
doorway gave. And even when she had the worst of
her headaches she liked to have her door open--I
suppose so that she might hear the approaching
footsteps of ruin and disaster. At any rate she
hated to be in a room with a shut door.

At that moment Leonora hated Edward with a
hatred that was like hell, and she would have
liked to bring her riding-whip down across the
girl's face. What right had Nancy to be young and
slender and dark, and gay at times, at times
mournful? What right had she to be exactly the
woman to make Leonora's husband happy? For
Leonora knew that Nancy would have made Edward
happy.

Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip
down on Nancy's young face. She imagined the
pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across
those queer features; the plea sure she would feel
at drawing the handle at the same moment toward
her, so as to cut deep into the flesh and to leave
a lasting wheal.

Well, she left a lasting wheal, and her words
cut deeply into the girl's mind. . . .

They neither of them spoke about that again. A
fortnight went by--a fortnight of deep rains, of
heavy fields, of bad scent. Leonora's headaches
seemed to have gone for good. She hunted once or
twice, letting herself be piloted by Bayham,
whilst Edward looked after the girl. Then, one
evening, when those three were dining alone,
Edward said, in the queer, deliberate, heavy tones
that came out of him in those days (he was looking
at the table):

"I have been thinking that Nancy ought to
do more for her father. He is getting an old man.
I have written to Colonel Rufford, suggesting that
she should go to him."

Leonora called out:

"How dare you? How dare you?"

The girl put her hand over her heart and cried
out: "Oh, my sweet Saviour, help mel"
That was the queer way she thought within her
mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips.
Edward said nothing.

And that night, by a merciless trick of the
devil that pays attention to this sweltering hell
of ours, Nancy Rufford had a letter from her
mother. It came whilst Leonora was talking to
Edward, or Leonora would have intercepted it as
she had intercepted others. It was an amazing and
a horrible letter. . . .

I don't know what it contained. I just average
out from its effects on Nancy that her mother,
having eloped with some worthless sort of fellow,
had done what is called "sinking lower and
lower". Whether she was actually on the
streets I do not know, but I rather think that she
eked out a small allowance that she had from her
husband by that means of livelihood. And I think
that she stated as much in her letter to Nancy and
upbraided the girl with living in luxury whilst
her mother starved. And it must have been
horrible in tone, for Mrs Rufford was a cruel sort
of woman at the best of times. It must have
seemed to that poor girl, opening her letter, for
distraction from another grief, up in her bedroom,
like the laughter of a devil.

I just cannot bear to think of my poor dear
girl at that moment. . . .

And, at the same time, Leonora was lashing,
like a cold fiend, into the unfortunate Edward.
Or, perhaps, he was not so unfortunate; because he
had done what he knew to be the right thing, he
may be deemed happy. I leave it to you. At any
rate, he was sitting in his deep chair, and
Leonora came into his room--for the first time in
nine years. She said:

"This is the most atrocious thing you have
done in your atrocious life." He never moved
and he never looked at her. God knows what was in
Leonora's mind exactly.

I like to think that, uppermost in it was
concern and horror at the thought of the poor
girl's going back to a father whose voice made her
shriek in the night. And, indeed, that motive was
very strong with Leonora. But I think there was
also present the thought that she wanted to go on
torturing Edward with the girl's presence. She
was, at that time, capable of that.

Edward was sunk in his chair; there were in the
room two candles, hidden by green glass shades.
The green shades were reflected in the glasses of
the book-cases that contained not books but guns
with gleaming brown barrels and fishing-rods in
green baize over-covers. There was dimly to be
seen, above a mantelpiece encumbered with spurs,
hooves and bronze models of horses, a dark-brown
picture of a white horse.

"If you think," Leonora said,
"that I do not know that you are in love with
the girl . . ." She began spiritedly, but
she could not find any ending for the sentence.
Edward did not stir; he never spoke. And then
Leonora said:

"If you want me to divorce you, I will.
You can marry her then. She's in love with
you."

He groaned at that, a little, Leonora said.
Then she went away.

Heaven knows what happened in Leonora after
that. She certainly does not herself know. She
probably said a good deal more to Edward than I
have been able to report; but that is all that she
has told me and I am not going to make up
speeches. To follow her psychological development
of that moment I think we must allow that she
upbraided him for a great deal of their past life,
whilst Edward sat absolutely silent. And, indeed,
in speaking of it afterwards, she has said several
times: "I said a great deal more to him than
I wanted to, just because he was so silent."
She talked, in fact, in the endeavour to sting him
into speech.

She must have said so much that, with the
expression of her grievance, her mood changed.
She went back to her own room in the gallery, and
sat there for a long time thinking. And she
thought herself into a mood of absolute
unselfishness, of absolute self-contempt, too.
She said to herself that she was no good; that she
had failed in all her efforts--in her efforts to
get Edward back as in her efforts to make him curb
his expenditure. She imagined herself to be
exhausted; she imagined herself to be done. Then
a great fear came over her.

She thought that Edward, after what she had
said to him, must have committed suicide. She
went out on to the gallery and listened; there was
no sound in all the house except the regular beat
of the great clock in the hall. But, even in her
debased condition, she was not the person to hang
about. She acted. She went straight to Edward's
room, opened the door, and looked in.

He was oiling the breech action of a gun. It
was an unusual thing for him to do, at that time
of night, in his evening clothes. It never
occurred to her, nevertheless, that he was going
to shoot himself with that implement. She knew
that he was doing it just for occupation--to keep
himself from thinking. He looked up when she
opened the door, his face illuminated by the light
cast upwards from the round orifices in the green
candle shades.

She said:

"I didn't imagine that I should find Nancy
here." She thought that she owed that to him.
He answered then:

"I don't imagine that you did imagine
it." Those were the only words he spoke that
night. She went, like a lame duck, back through
the long corridors; she stumbled over the familiar
tiger skins in the dark hall. She could hardly
drag one limb after the other. In the gallery she
perceived that Nancy's door was half open and that
there was a light in the girl's room. A sudden
madness possessed her, a desire for action, a
thirst for self-explanation.

Their rooms all gave on to the gallery;
Leonora's to the east, the girl's next, then
Edward's. The sight of those three open doors,
side by side, gaping to receive whom the chances
of the black night might bring, made Leonora
shudder all over her body. She went into Nancy's
room.

The girl was sitting perfectly still in an
armchair, very upright, as she had been taught to
sit at the convent. She appeared to be as calm as
a church; her hair fell, black and like a pall,
down over both her shoulders. The fire beside her
was burning brightly; she must have just put coals
on. She was in a white silk kimono that covered
her to the feet. The clothes that she had taken
off were exactly folded upon the proper seats.
Her long hands were one upon each arm of the chair
that had a pink and white chintz back.

Leonora told me these things. She seemed to
think it extraordinary that the girl could have
done such orderly things as fold up the clothes
she had taken off upon such a night--when Edward
had announced that he was going to send her to her
father, and when, from her mother, she had
received that letter. The letter, in its
envelope, was in her right hand.

Leonora did not at first perceive it. She
said:

"What are you doing so late?"

The girl answered: "Just
thinking."

They seemed to think in whispers and to speak
below their breaths. Then Leonora's eyes fell on
the envelope, and she recognized Mrs Rufford's
handwriting.

It was one of those moments when thinking was
impossible, Leonora said. It was as if stones
were being thrown at her from every direction and
she could only run. She heard herself exclaim:

"Edward's dying--because of you. He's
dying. He's worth more than either of
us. . . ."

The girl looked past her at the panels of the
half-closed door.

"My poor father," she said, "my
poor father."

"You must stay here," Leonora
answered fiercely. "You must stay here. I
tell you you must stay here."

It appears that it was in Glasgow that Mrs
Rufford pursued her disorderly life. She had
selected that city, not because it was more
profitable but because it was the natal home of
her husband to whom she desired to cause as much
pain as possible.

Leonora uttered an "Ah," that, in
spite of herself, was an "Ah" of horror
and of grief.

"That is why," the girl continued,
"I am going to Glasgow--to take my mother
away from there." She added, "To the
ends of the earth," for, if the last months
had made her nature that of a woman, her phrases
were still romantically those of a schoolgirl. It
was as if she had grown up so quickly that there
had not been time to put her hair up. But she
added: "We're no good--my mother and
I."

Leonora said, with her fierce calmness:

"No. No. You're not no good. It's I
that am no good. You can't let that man go on to
ruin for want of you. You must belong to
him."

The girl, she said, smiled at her with a queer,
far-away smile--as if she were a thousand years
old, as if Leonora were a tiny child.

"I knew you would come to that,' she said,
very slowly. "But we are not worth
it--Edward and I."

III

NANCY had, in fact, been thinking ever since
Leonora had made that comment over the giving of
the horse to young Selmes. She had been thinking
and thinking, because she had had to sit for many
days silent beside her aunt's bed. (She had
always thought of Leonora as her aunt.) And she
had had to sit thinking during many silent meals
with Edward. And then, at times, with his
bloodshot eyes and creased, heavy mouth, he would
smile at her. And gradually the knowledge had
come to her that Edward did not love Leonora and
that Leonora hated Edward. Several things
contributed to form and to harden this conviction.

She was allowed to read the papers in those
days--or, rather, since Leonora was always on her
bed and Edward breakfasted alone and went out
early, over the estate, she was left alone with
the papers. One day, in the papers, she saw the
portrait of a woman she knew very well. Beneath
it she read the words: "The Hon. Mrs Brand,
plaintiff in the remarkable divorce case reported
on p. 8." Nancy hardly knew what a divorce
case was. She had been so remarkably well brought
up, and Roman Catholics do not practise divorce.
I don't know how Leonora had done it exactly. I
suppose she had always impressed it on Nancy's
mind that nice women did not read these things,
and that would have been enough to make Nancy skip
those pages.

She read, at any rate, the account of the Brand
divorce case--principally because she wanted to
tell Leonora about it. She imagined that Leonora,
when her headache left her, would like to know
what was happening to Mrs Brand, who lived at
Christchurch, and whom they both liked very well.
The case occupied three days, and the report that
Nancy first came upon was that of the third day.
Edward, however, kept the papers of the week,
after his methodical fashion, in a rack in his
gun-room, and when she had finished her breakfast
Nancy went to that quiet apartment and had what
she would have called a good read. It seemed to
her to be a queer affair. She could not
understand why one counsel should be so anxious to
know all about the movements of Mr Brand upon a
certain day; she could not understand why a chart
of the bedroom accommodation at Christchurch Old
Hall should be produced in court. She did not
even see why they should want to know that, upon a
certain occasion, the drawing-room door was
locked. It made her laugh; it appeared to be all
so senseless that grown people should occupy
themselves with such matters. It struck her,
nevertheless, as odd that one of the counsel
should cross-question Mr Brand so insistently and
so impertinently as to his feelings for Miss
Lupton. Nancy knew Miss Lupton of Ringwood very
well--a jolly girl, who rode a horse with two
white fetlocks. Mr Brand persisted that he did
not love Miss Lupton. . . . Well, of course he
did not love Miss Lupton; he was a married man.
You might as well think of Uncle Edward loving .
. . loving anybody but Leonora. When people were
married there was an end of loving. There were,
no doubt, people who misbehaved--but they were
poor people--or people not like those she knew.

So these matters presented themselves to
Nancy's mind. But later on in the case she found
that Mr Brand had to confess to a "guilty
intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy
imagined that he must have been telling some one
his wife's secrets; she could not understand why
that was a serious offence. Of course it was not
very gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of Mrs
Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand had
condoned that offence, she imagined that they
could not have been very serious secrets that Mr
Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced
on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild Mr Brand
that she had seen a month or two before their
departure to Nauheim, playing "Blind Man's
Buff" with his children and kissing his wife
when he caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had
been on the worst possible terms. That was
incredible.

Yet there it was--in black and white. Mr Brand
drank; Mr Brand had struck Mrs Brand to the ground
when he was drunk. Mr Brand was adjudged, in two
or three abrupt words, at the end of columns and
columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty
to his wife and to have committed adultery with
Miss Lupton. The last words conveyed nothing to
Nancy--nothing real, that is to say. She knew
that one was commanded not to commit adultery--but
why, she thought, should one? It was probably
something like catching salmon out of season--a
thing one did not do. She gathered it had
something to do with kissing, or holding some one
in your arms. . . .

And yet the whole effect of that reading upon
Nancy was mysterious, terrifying and evil. She
felt a sickness--a sickness that grew as she read.
Her heart beat painfully; she began to cry. She
asked God how He could permit such things to be.
And she was more certain that Edward did not love
Leonora and that Leonora hated Edward. Perhaps,
then, Edward loved some one else. It was
unthinkable.

If he could love some one else than Leonora,
her fierce unknown heart suddenly spoke in her
side, why could it not be herself? And he did not
love her. . . . This had occurred about a
month before she got the letter from her mother.
She let the matter rest until the sick feeling
went off; it did that in a day or two. Then,
finding that Leonora's headaches had gone, she
suddenly told Leonora that Mrs Brand had divorced
her husband. She asked what, exactly, it all
meant.

Leonora was lying on the sofa in the hall; she
was feeling so weak that she could hardly find the
words. She answered just:

"It means that Mr Brand will be able to
marry again."

Nancy said:

"But . . . but . . ." and then:
"He will be able to marry Miss Lupton."
Leonora just moved a hand in assent. Her eyes
were shut.

"Then . . ." Nancy began. Her blue
eyes were full of horror: her brows were tight
above them; the lines of pain about her mouth were
very distinct. In her eyes the whole of that
familiar, great hall had a changed aspect. The
andirons with the brass flowers at the ends
appeared unreal; the burning logs were just logs
that were burning and not the comfortable symbols
of an indestructible mode of life.
The flame fluttered before the high fireback; the
St Bernard sighed in his sleep. Outside the
winter rain fell and fell. And suddenly she
thought that Edward might marry some one else; and
she nearly screamed.

Leonora opened her eyes, lying sideways, with
her face upon the black and gold pillow of the
sofa that was drawn half across the great
fireplace.

"I thought," Nancy said, "I
never imagined. . . .
Aren't marriages sacraments? Aren't they
indissoluble? I thought you were married . . .
and . . ." She was sobbing. "I
thought you were married or not married as you are
alive or dead."

"That," Leonora said, "is the
law of the church. It is not the law of the land.
. . ."

"Oh yes," Nancy said, "the
Brands are Protestants." She felt a sudden
safeness descend upon her, and for an hour or so
her mind was at rest. It seemed to her idiotic
not to have remembered Henry VIII and the basis
upon which Protestantism rests. She almost
laughed at herself.

The long afternoon wore on; the flames still
fluttered when the maid made up the fire; the St
Bernard awoke and lolloped away towards the
kitchen. And then Leonora opened her eyes and
said almost coldly:

"And you? Don't you think you will get
married?"

It was so unlike Leonora that, for the moment,
the girl was frightened in the dusk. But then,
again, it seemed a perfectly reasonable question.

"But I don't want to
marry," Nancy answered. "I should like
to go on living with you and Edward. I don't
think I am in the way or that I am really an
expense. If I went you would have to have a
companion. Or, perhaps, I ought to earn my
living. . . ."

"I wasn't thinking of that," Leonora
answered in the same dull tone. "You will
have money enough from your father. But most
people want to be married."

I believe that she then asked the girl if she
would not like to marry me, and that Nancy
answered that she would marry me if she were told
to; but that she wanted to go on living there.
She added:

"If I married anyone I should want him to
be like Edward."

She was frightened out of her life. Leonora
writhed on her couch and called out: "Oh,
God!
. . ."

Nancy ran for the maid; for tablets of aspirin;
for wet handkerchiefs. It never occurred to her
that Leonora's expression of agony was for
anything else than physical pain.

You are to remember that all this happened a
month before Leonora went into the girl's room at
night. I have been casting back again; but I
cannot help it. It is so difficult to keep all
these people going. I tell you about Leonora and
bring her up to date; then about Edward, who has
fallen behind. And then the girl gets hopelessly
left behind. I wish I could put it down in diary
form. Thus: On the 1st of September they returned
from Nauheim. Leonora at once took to her bed.
By the 1st of October they were all going to meets
together. Nancy had already observed very fully
that Edward was strange in his manner. About the
6th of that month Edward gave the horse to young
Selmes, and Nancy had cause to believe that her
aunt did not love her uncle. On the 20th she read
the account of the divorce case, which is reported
in the papers of the 18th and the two following
days. On the 23rd she had the conversation with
her aunt in the hall--about marriage in general
and about her own possible marriage, her aunt's
coming to her bedroom did not occur until the 12th
of November. . . .

Thus she had three weeks for introspection--for
introspection beneath gloomy skies, in that old
house, rendered darker by the fact that it lay in
a hollow crowned by fir trees with their black
shadows. It was not a good situation for a girl.
She began thinking about love, she who had never
before considered it as anything other than a
rather humorous, rather nonsensical matter. She
remembered chance passages in chance
books--things that had not really affected her at all at
the time. She remembered someone's love for the
Princess Badrulbadour; she remembered to have
heard that love was a flame, a thirst, a withering
up of the vitals--though she did not know what the
vitals were. She had a vague recollection that
love was said to render a hopeless lover's eyes
hopeless; she remembered a character in a book who
was said to have taken to drink through love; she
remembered that lovers' existences were said to be
punctuated with heavy sighs. Once she went to the
little cottage piano that was in the corner of the
hall and began to play. It was a tinkly, reedy
instrument, for none of that household had any
turn for music. Nancy herself could play a few
simple songs, and she found herself playing. She
had been sitting on the window seat, looking out
on the fading day. Leonora had gone to pay some
calls; Edward was looking after some planting up
in the new spinney. Thus she found herself
playing on the old piano. She did not know how
she came to be doing it. A silly lilting wavering
tune came from before her in the dusk--a tune in
which major notes with their cheerful insistence
wavered and melted into minor sounds, as, beneath
a bridge, the high lights on dark waters melt and
waver and disappear into black depths. Well, it
was a silly old tune. . . .

It goes with the words--they are about a willow
tree, I think:

Thou art to all lost
loves the best
The only true plant found.

--That sort of thing. It is Herrick, I
believe, and the music with the reedy, irregular,
lilting sound that goes with Herrick, And it was
dusk; the heavy, hewn, dark pillars that supported
the gallery were like mourning presences; the fire
had sunk to nothing--a mere glow amongst white
ashes,
. . . It was a sentimental sort of place and
light and hour. . . .

And suddenly Nancy found that she was crying.
She was crying quietly; she went on to cry with
long convulsive sobs. It seemed to her that
everything gay, everything charming, all light,
all sweetness, had gone out of life. Unhappiness;
unhappiness; unhappiness was all around her. She
seemed to know no happy being and she herself was
agonizing. . . .

She remembered that Edward's eyes were
hopeless; she was certain that he was drinking too
much; at times he sighed deeply. He appeared as a
man who was burning with inward flame; drying up
in the soul with thirst; withering up in the
vitals. Then, the torturing conviction came to
her--the conviction that had visited her again and
again--that Edward must love some one other than
Leonora. With her little, pedagogic sectarianism
she remembered that Catholics do not do this
thing. But Edward was a Protestant. Then Edward
loved somebody. . . .

And, after that thought, her eyes grew
hopeless; she sighed as the old St Bernard beside
her did. At meals she would feel an intolerable
desire to drink a glass of wine, and then another
and then a third. Then she would find herself
grow gay. . . . But in half an hour the gaiety
went; she felt like a person who is burning up
with an inward flame; desiccating at the soul with
thirst; withering up in the vitals. One evening
she went into Edward's gun-room--he had gone to a
meeting of the National Reserve Committee. On the
table beside his chair was a decanter of whisky.
She poured out a wineglassful and drank it off.

Flame then really seemed to fill her body; her
legs swelled; her face grew feverish. She dragged
her tall height up to her room and lay in the
dark. The bed reeled beneath her; she gave way to
the thought that she was in Edward's arms; that he
was kissing her on her face that burned; on her
shoulders that burned, and on her neck that was on
fire.

She never touched alcohol again. Not once
after that did she have such thoughts. They died
out of her mind; they left only a feeling of shame
so insupportable that her brain could not take it
in and they vanished. She imagined that her
anguish at the thought of Edward's love for
another person was solely sympathy for Leonora;
she determined that the rest of her life must be
spent in acting as Leonora's handmaiden--sweeping,
tending, embroidering, like some Deborah, some
medieval saint--I am not, unfortunately, up in the
Catholic hagiology. But I know that she pictured
herself as some personage with a depressed,
earnest face and tightly closed lips, in a clear
white room, watering flowers or tending an
embroidery frame. Or, she desired to go with
Edward to Africa and to throw herself in the path
of a charging lion so that Edward might be saved
for Leonora at the cost of her life. Well, along
with her sad thoughts she had her childish ones.

She knew nothing--nothing of life, except that
one must live sadly. That she now knew. What
happened to her on the night when she received at
once the blow that Edward wished her to go to her
father in India and the blow of the letter from
her mother was this. She called first upon her
sweet Saviour--and she thought of Our Lord as her
sweet Saviour!--that He might make it impossible
that she should go to India. Then she realized
from Edward's demeanour that he was determined
that she should go to India. It must then be
right that she should go. Edward was always right
in his determinations. He was the Cid; he was
Lohengrin; he was the Chevalier Bayard.

Nevertheless her mind mutinied and revolted.
She could not leave that house. She imagined that
he wished her gone that she might not witness his
amours with another girl. Well, she was prepared
to tell him that she was ready to witness his
amours with another young girl. She would stay
there --to comfort Leonora.

Then came the desperate shock of the letter
from her mother. Her mother said, I believe,
something like: "You have no right to go on
living your life of prosperity and respect. You
ought to be on the streets with me. How do you
know that you are even Colonel Rufford's
daughter?" She did not know what these words
meant. She thought of her mother as sleeping
beneath the arches whilst the snow fell. That was
the impression conveyed to her mind by the words
"on the streets". A Platonic sense of
duty gave her the idea that she ought to go to
comfort her mother--the mother that bore her,
though she hardly knew what the words meant. At
the same time she knew that her mother had left
her father with another man--therefore she pitied
her father, and thought it terrible in herself
that she trembled at the sound of her father's
voice. If her mother was that sort of woman it
was natural that her father should have had
accesses of madness in which he had struck herself
to the ground. And the voice of her conscience
said to her that her first duty was to her
parents. It was in accord with this awakened
sense of duty that she undressed with great care
and meticulously folded the clothes that she took
off. Sometimes, but not very often, she threw
them helter-skelter about the room.

And that sense of duty was her prevailing mood
when Leonora, tall, clean-run, golden-haired, all
in black, appeared in her doorway, and told her
that Edward was dying of love for her. She knew
then with her conscious mind what she had known
within herself for months--that Edward was
dying--actually and physically dying--of love for
her. It seemed to her that for one short moment
her spirit could say: "Domine, nunc dimittis,
. .
. Lord, now, lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace." She imagined that she could
cheerfully go away to Glasgow and rescue her
fallen mother.

IV

AND it seemed to her to be in tune with the
mood, with the hour, and with the woman in front
of her to say that she knew Edward was dying of
love for her and that she was dying of love for
Edward. For that fact had suddenly slipped into
place and become real for her as the niched marker
on a whist tablet slips round with the pressure of
your thumb. That rubber at least was made.

And suddenly Leonora seemed to have become
different and she seemed to have become different
in her attitude towards Leonora. It was as if
she, in her frail, white, silken kimono, sat
beside her fire, but upon a throne. It was as if
Leonora, in her close dress of black lace, with
the gleaming white shoulders and the coiled yellow
hair that the girl had always considered the most
beautiful thing in the world--it was as if Leonora
had become pinched, shrivelled, blue with cold,
shivering, suppliant. Yet Leonora was commanding
her. It was no good commanding her. She was
going on the morrow to her mother who was in
Glasgow.

Leonora went on saying that she must stay there
to save Edward, who was dying of love for her.
And, proud and happy in the thought that Edward
loved her, and that she loved him, she did not
even listen to what Leonora said. It appeared to
her that it was Leonora's business to save her
husband's body; she, Nancy, possessed his soul--a
precious thing that she would shield and bear away
up in her arms--as if Leonora were a hungry dog,
trying to spring up at a lamb that she was
carrying. Yes, she felt as if Edward's love were
a precious lamb that she were bearing away from a
cruel and predatory beast. For, at that time,
Leonora appeared to her as a cruel and predatory
beast. Leonora, Leonora with her hunger, with her
cruelty had driven Edward to madness. He must be
sheltered by his love for her and by her love--her
love from a great distance and unspoken,
enveloping him, surrounding him, upholding him; by
her voice speaking from Glasgow, saying that she
loved, that she adored, that she passed no moment
without longing, loving, quivering at the thought
of him.

Leonora said loudly, insistently, with a
bitterly imperative tone:

"You must stay here; you must belong to
Edward. I will divorce him."

The girl answered:

"The Church does not allow of divorce. I
cannot belong to your husband. I am going to
Glasgow to rescue my mother."

The half-opened door opened noiselessly to the
full. Edward was there. His devouring, doomed
eyes were fixed on the girl's face; his shoulders
slouched forward; he was undoubtedly half drunk
and he had the whisky decanter in one hand, a
slanting candlestick in the other. He said, with
a heavy ferocity, to Nancy:

"I forbid you to talk about these things.
You are to stay here until I hear from your
father. Then you will go to your
father."

The two women, looking at each other, like
beasts about to spring, hardly gave a glance to
him. He leaned against the door-post. He said
again:

"Nancy, I forbid you to talk about these
things. I am the master of this house." And,
at the sound of his voice, heavy, male, coming
from a deep chest, in the night with the blackness
behind him, Nancy felt as if her spirit bowed
before him, with folded hands. She felt that she
would go to India, and that she desired never
again to talk of these things.

Leonora said:

"You see that it is your duty to belong to
him. He must not be allowed to go on
drinking."

Nancy did not answer. Edward was gone; they
heard him slipping and shambling on the polished
oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there came
the sound of a heavy fall. Leonora said again:

"You see!"

The sounds went on from the hall below; the
light of the candle Edward held flickered up
between the hand rails of the gallery. Then they
heard his voice:

"Give me Glasgow . . . Glasgow, in
Scotland
. . I want the number of a man called White, of
Simrock Park, Glasgow . . . Edward White,
Simrock Park, Glasgow . . . ten minutes . . .
at this time of night . . ." His voice was
quite level, normal, and patient. Alcohol took
him in the legs, not the speech. "I can
wait," his voice came again. "Yes, I
know they have a number. I have been in
communication with them before."

"He is going to telephone to your
mother," Leonora said. "He will make it
all right for her." She got up and closed the
door. She came back to the fire, and added
bitterly: "He can always make it all right
for everybody, except me--excepting me!"

The girl said nothing. She sat there in a
blissful dream. She seemed to see her lover
sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed chair,
in the dark hall--sitting low, with the receiver
at his ear, talking in a gentle, slow voice, that
he reserved for the telephone--and saving the
world and her, in the black darkness. She moved
her hand over the bareness of the base of her
throat, to have the warmth of flesh upon it and
upon her bosom.

She said nothing; Leonora went on talking. .
. .

God knows what Leonora said. She repeated that
the girl must belong to her husband. She said
that she used that phrase because, though she
might have a divorce, or even a dissolution of the
marriage by the Church, it would still be adultery
that the girl and Edward would be committing. But
she said that that was necessary; it was the price
that the girl must pay for the sin of having made
Edward love her, for the sin of loving her
husband. She talked on and on, beside the fire.
The girl must become an adulteress; she had
wronged Edward by being so beautiful, so gracious,
so good. It was sinful to be so good. She must
pay the price so as to save the man she had
wronged.

In between her pauses the girl could hear the
voice of Edward, droning on, indistinguishably,
with jerky pauses for replies. It made her glow
with pride; the man she loved was working for her.
He at least was resolved; was malely determined;
knew the right thing. Leonora talked on with her
eyes boring into Nancy's. The girl hardly looked
at her and hardly heard her. After a long time
Nancy said--after hours and hours:

"I shall go to India as soon as Edward
hears from my father. I cannot talk about these
things, because Edward does not wish it."

At that Leonora screamed out and wavered
swiftly towards the closed door. And Nancy found
that she was springing out of her chair with her
white arms stretched wide. She was clasping the
other woman to her breast; she was saying:

"Oh, my poor dear; oh, my poor dear."
And they sat, crouching together in each other's
arms, and crying and crying; and they lay down in
the same bed, talking and talking, all through the
night. And all through the night Edward could
hear their voices through the wall. That was how
it went. . . .

Next morning they were all three as if nothing
had happened. Towards eleven Edward came to
Nancy, who was arranging some Christmas roses in a
silver bowl. He put a telegram beside her on the
table. "You can uncode it for
yourself," he said. Then, as he went out of
the door, he said: "You can tell your aunt I
have cabled to Mr Dowell to come over. He will
make things easier till you leave." The
telegram when it was uncoded, read, as far as I
can remember: "Will take Mrs Rufford to
Italy. Undertake to do this for certain. Am
devotedly attached to Mrs Rufford. Have no need
of financial assistance. Did not know there was a
daughter, and am much obliged to you for pointing
out my duty.--White." It was something like
that. Then the household resumed its wonted
course of days until my arrival.

V

IT is this part of the story that makes me
saddest of all. For I ask myself unceasingly, my
mind going round and round in a weary, baffled
space of pain--what should these people have done?
What, in the name of God, should they have
done?

The end was perfectly plain to each of them--it
was perfectly manifest at this stage that, if the
girl did not, in Leonora's phrase, "belong to
Edward," Edward must die, the girl must lose
her reason because Edward died--and, that after a
time, Leonora, who was the coldest and the
strongest of the three, would console herself by
marrying Rodney Bayham and have a quiet,
comfortable, good time. That end, on that night,
whilst Leonora sat in the girl's bedroom and
Edward telephoned down below--that end was plainly
manifest. The girl, plainly, was half-mad
already; Edward was half dead; only Leonora,
active, persistent, instinct with her cold passion
of energy, was "doing things". What
then, should they have done? worked out in the
extinction of two very splendid personalities--for
Edward and the girl were splendid
personalities, in order that a third personality,
more normal, should have, after a long period of
trouble, a quiet, comfortable, good time.

I am writing this, now, I should say, a full
eighteen months after the words that end my last
chapter. Since writing the words "until my
arrival", which I see end that paragraph, I
have seen again for a glimpse, from a swift train,
Beaucaire with the beautiful white tower, Tarascon
with the square castle, the great Rhone, the
immense stretches of the Crau. I have rushed
through all Provence--and all Provence no longer
matters. It is no longer in the olive hills that
I shall find my Heaven; because there is only
Hell. . . .

Edward is dead; the girl is gone--oh, utterly
gone; Leonora is having a good time with Rodney
Bayham, and I sit alone in Branshaw Teleragh. I
have been through Provence; I have seen Africa; I
have visited Asia to see, in Ceylon, in a darkened
room, my poor girl, sitting motionless, with her
wonderful hair about her, looking at me with eyes
that did not see me, and saying distinctly:
"Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem. . . .
Credo in unum Deum omnipotentem." Those are
the only reasonable words she uttered; those are
the only words, it appears, that she ever will
utter. I suppose that they are reasonable words;
it must be extraordinarily reasonable for her, if
she can say that she believes in an Omnipotent
Deity. Well, there it is. I am very tired of it.
all. . . .

For, I daresay, all this may sound romantic,
but it is tiring, tiring, tiring to have been in
the midst of it; to have taken the tickets; to
have caught the trains; to have chosen the cabins;
to have consulted the purser and the stewards as
to diet for the quiescent patient who did nothing
but announce her belief in an Omnipotent Deity.
That may sound romantic--but it is just a record
of fatigue.

I don't know why I should always be selected to
be serviceable. I don't resent it--but I have
never been the least good. Florence selected me
for her own purposes, and I was no good to her;
Edward called me to come and have a chat with him,
and I couldn't stop him cutting his throat.

And then, one day eighteen months ago, I was
quietly writing in my room at Branshaw when
Leonora came to me with a letter. It was a very
pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy.
Colonel Rufford had left the army and had taken up
an appointment at a tea-planting estate in Ceylon.
His letter was pathetic because it was so brief,
so inarticulate, and so business-like. He had
gone down to the boat to meet his daughter, and
had found his daughter quite mad. It appears that
at Aden Nancy had seen in a local paper the news
of Edward's suicide. In the Red Sea she had gone
mad. She had remarked to Mrs Colonel Luton, who
was chaperoning her, that she believed in an
Omnipotent Deity. She hadn't made any fuss; her
eyes were quite dry and glassy. Even when she was
mad Nancy could behave herself.

Colonel Rufford said the doctor did not
anticipate that there was any chance of his
child's recovery. It was, nevertheless, possible
that if she could see someone from Branshaw it
might soothe her and it might have a good effect.
And he just simply wrote to Leonora: "Please
come and see if you can do it."

I seem to have lost all sense of the pathetic;
but still, that simple, enormous request of the
old colonel strikes me as pathetic. He was cursed
by his atrocious temper; he had been cursed by a
half-mad wife, who drank and went on the streets.
His daughter was totally mad--and yet he believed
in the goodness of human nature. He believed that
Leonora would take the trouble to go all the way
to Ceylon in order to soothe his daughter.
Leonora wouldn't. Leonora didn't ever want to see
Nancy again. I daresay that that, in the
circumstances, was natural enough. At the same
time she agreed, as it were, on public grounds,
that someone soothing ought to go from Branshaw to
Ceylon. She sent me and her old nurse, who had
looked after Nancy from the time when the girl, a
child of thirteen, had first come to Branshaw. So
off I go, rushing through Provence, to catch the
steamer at Marseilles. And I wasn't the least
good when I got to Ceylon; and the nurse wasn't
the least good. Nothing has been the least good.

The doctors said, at Kandy, that if Nancy could
be brought to England, the sea air, the change of
climate, the voyage, and all the usual sort of
things, might restore her reason. Of course, they
haven't restored her reason. She is, I am aware,
sitting in the hall, forty paces from where I am
now writing. I don't want to be in the least
romantic about it. She is very well dressed; she
is quite quiet; she is very beautiful. The old
nurse looks after her very efficiently.

Of course you have the makings of a situation
here, but it is all very humdrum, as far as I am
concerned. I should marry Nancy if her reason
were ever sufficiently restored to let her
appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage
service. But it is probable that her reason will
never be sufficiently restored to let her
appreciate the meaning of the Anglican marriage
service. Therefore I cannot marry her, according
to the law of the land.

So here I am very much where I started thirteen
years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband,
of a beautiful girl, who pays no attention to me.
I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney
Bayham in my absence and went to live at Bayham.
Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it
into her head that I disapprove of her marriage
with Rodney Bayham. Well, I disapprove of her
marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I
am jealous. In my fainter sort of way I seem to
perceive myself following the lines of Edward
Ashburnham. I suppose that I should really like
to be a polygamist; with Nancy, and with Leonora,
and with Maisie Maidan and possibly even with
Florence. I am no doubt like every other man;
only, probably because of my American origin I am
fainter. At the same time I am able to assure you
that I am a strictly respectable person. I have
never done anything that the most anxious mother
of a daughter or the most careful dean of a
cathedral would object to. I have only followed,
faintly, and in my unconscious desires, Edward
Ashburnham. Well, it is all over. Not one of us
has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted
Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant
enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw,
and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I
didn't really want it; what I wanted mostly was to
cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a
nurse-attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and
I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer
and fantastic world. Why can't people have what
they want? The things were all there to content
everybody; yet everybody has the wrong thing.
Perhaps you can make head or tail of it; it is
beyond me.

Is there any terrestial paradise where, amidst
the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be
with whom they like and have what they like and
take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or
are all men's lives like the lives of us good
people--like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the
Dowells, of the Ruffords--broken, tumultuous,
agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods
punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths,
by agonies? Who the devil knows?

For there was a great deal of imbecility about
the closing scenes of the Ashburnham tragedy.
Neither of those two women knew what they wanted.
It was only Edward who took a perfectly clear
line, and he was drunk most of the time. But,
drunk or sober, he stuck to what was demanded by
convention and by the traditions of his house.
Nancy Rufford had to be exported to India, and
Nancy Rufford hadn't to hear a word of love from
him. She was exported to India and she never
heard a word from Edward Ashburnham.

It was the conventional line; it was in tune
with the tradition of Edward's house. I daresay
it worked out for the greatest good of the body
politic. Conventions and traditions, I suppose,
work blindly but surely for the preservation of
the normal type; for the extinction of proud,
resolute and unusual individuals.

Edward was the normal man, but there was too
much of the sentimentalist about him; and society
does not need too many sentimentalists. Nancy was
a splendid creature, but she had about her a touch
of madness. Society does not need individuals
with touches of madness about them. So Edward and
Nancy found themselves steamrolled out and Leonora
survives, the perfectly normal type, married to a
man who is rather like a rabbit. For Rodney
Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that
Leonora is expected to have a baby in three
months' time.

So those splendid and tumultuous creatures with
their magnetism and their passions--those two that
I really loved--have gone from this earth. It is
no doubt best for them. What would Nancy have
made of Edward if she had succeeded in living with
him; what would Edward have made of her? For
there was about Nancy a touch of cruelty--a touch
of definite actual cruelty that made her desire to
see people suffer. Yes, she desired to see Edward
suffer. And, by God, she gave him hell.

She gave him an unimaginable hell. Those two
women pursued that poor devil and flayed the skin
off him as if they had done it with whips. I tell
you his mind bled almost visibly. I seem to see
him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms
shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him in
rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what
I feel. It was as if Leonora and Nancy banded
themselves together to do execution, for the sake
of humanity, upon the body of a man who was at
their disposal. They were like a couple of Sioux
who had got hold of an Apache and had him well
tied to a stake. I tell you there was no end to
the tortures they inflicted upon him.

Night after night he would hear them talking;
talking; maddened, sweating, seeking oblivion in
drink, he would lie there and hear the voices
going on and on. And day after day Leonora would
come to him and would announce the results of
their deliberations.

They were like judges debating over the
sentence upon a criminal; they were like ghouls
with an immobile corpse in a tomb beside them.

I don't think that Leonora was any more to
blame than the girl--though Leonora was the more
active of the two. Leonora, as I have said, was
the perfectly normal woman. I mean to say that in
normal circumstances her desires were those of the
woman who is needed by society. She desired
children, decorum, an establishment; she desired
to avoid waste, she desired to keep up
appearances. She was utterly and entirely normal
even in her utterly undeniable beauty. But I
don't mean to say that she acted perfectly
normally in this perfectly abnormal situation.
All the world was mad around her and she herself,
agonized, took on the complexion of a mad woman;
of a woman very wicked; of the villain of the
piece. What would you have? Steel is a normal,
hard, polished substance. But, if you put it in a
hot fire it will become red, soft, and not to be
handled. If you put it in a fire still more hot
it will drip away. It was like that with Leonora.
She was made for normal circumstances--for Mr
Rodney Bayham, who will keep a separate
establishment, secretly, in Portsmouth, and make
occasional trips to Paris and to Budapest.

In the case of Edward and the girl, Leonora
broke and simply went all over the place. She
adopted unfamiliar and therefore extraordinary and
ungraceful attitudes of mind. At one moment she
was all for revenge. After haranguing the girl
for hours through the night she harangued for
hours of the day the silent Edward. And Edward
just once tripped up, and that was his undoing.
Perhaps he had had too much whisky that afternoon.

She asked him perpetually what he wanted. What
did he want? What did he want? And all he ever
answered was: "I have told you". He
meant that he wanted the girl to go to her father
in India as soon as her father should cable that
he was ready to receive her. But just once he
tripped up. To Leonora's eternal question he
answered that all he desired in life was
that--that he could pick himself together again
and go on with his daily occupations if--the girl,
being five thousand miles away, would continue to
love him. He wanted nothing more, He prayed his
God for nothing more. Well, he was a
sentimentalist.

And the moment that she heard that, Leonora
determined that the girl should not go five
thousand miles away and that she should not
continue to love Edward. The way she worked it
was this:

She continued to tell the girl that she must
belong to Edward; she was going to get a divorce;
she was going to get a dissolution of marriage
from Rome. But she considered it to be her duty
to warn the girl of the sort of monster that
Edward was. She told the girl of La Dolciquita,
of Mrs Basil, of Maisie Maidan, of Florence. She
spoke of the agonies that she had endured during
her life with the man, who was violent,
overbearing, vain, drunken, arrogant, and
monstrously a prey to his sexual necessities.
And, at hearing of the miseries her aunt had
suffered--for Leonora once more had the aspect of
an aunt to the girl--with the swift cruelty of
youth and, with the swift solidarity that attaches
woman to woman, the girl made her resolves. Her
aunt said incessantly: "You must save
Edward's life; you must save his life. All that
he needs is a little period of satisfaction from
you. Then he will tire of you as he has of the
others. But you must save his life."

And, all the while, that wretched fellow
knew--by a curious instinct that runs between
human beings living together--exactly what was
going on. And he remained dumb; he stretched out
no finger to help himself. All that he required
to keep himself a decent member of society was,
that the girl, five thousand miles away, should
continue to love him. They were putting a stopper
upon that.

I have told you that the girl came one night to
his room. And that was the real hell for him.
That was the picture that never left his
imagination--the girl, in the dim light, rising up
at the foot of his bed. He said that it seemed to
have a greenish sort of effect as if there were a
greenish tinge in the shadows of the tall bedposts
that framed her body. And she looked at him with
her straight eyes of an unflinching cruelty and
she said: "I am ready to belong to you--to
save your life."

He answered: "I don't want it; I don't
want it; I don't want it."

And he says that he didn't want it; that he
would have hated himself; that it was unthinkable.
And all the while he had the immense temptation to
do the unthinkable thing, not from the physical
desire but because of a mental certitude. He was
certain that if she had once submitted to him she
would remain his for ever. He knew that.

She was thinking that her aunt had said he had
desired her to love him from a distance of five
thousand miles. She said: "I can never love
you now I know the kind of man you are. I will
belong to you to save your life. But I can never
love you."

It was a fantastic display of cruelty. She
didn't in the least know what it meant--to belong
to a man. But, at that Edward pulled himself
together. He spoke in his normal tones; gruff,
husky, overbearing, as he would have done to a
servant or to a horse.

"Go back to your room," he said.
"Go back to your room and go to sleep. This
is all nonsense."

They were baffled, those two women.

And then I came on the scene.

VI

MY coming on the scene certainly calmed things
down--for the whole fortnight that intervened
between my arrival and the girl's departure. I
don't mean to say that the endless talking did not
go on at night or that Leonora did not send me out
with the girl and, in the interval, give Edward a
hell of a time. Having discovered what he
wanted--that the girl should go five thousand
miles away and love him steadfastly as people do
in sentimental novels, she was determined to smash
that aspiration. And she repeated to Edward in
every possible tone that the girl did not love
him; that the girl detested him for his brutality,
his overbearingness, his drinking habits. She
pointed out that Edward in the girl's eyes, was
already pledged three or four deep. He was
pledged to Leonora herself, to Mrs Basil, and to
the memories of Maisie Maidan and to Florence.
Edward never said anything.

Did the girl love Edward, or didn't she? I
don't know. At that time I daresay she didn't
though she certainly had done so before Leonora
had got to work upon his reputation. She
certainly had loved him for what I call the public
side of his record--for his good soldiering, for
his saving lives at sea, for the excellent
landlord that he was and the good sportsman. But
it is quite possible that all those things came to
appear as nothing in her eyes when she discovered
that he wasn't a good husband. For, though women,
as I see them, have little or no feeling of
responsibility towards a county or a country or a
career--although they may be entirely lacking in
any kind of communal solidarity--they have an
immense and automatically working instinct that
attaches them to the interest of womanhood. It
is, of course, possible for any woman to cut out
and to carry off any other woman's husband or
lover. But I rather think that a woman will only
do this if she has reason to believe that the
other woman has given her husband a bad time. I
am certain that if she thinks the man has been a
brute to his wife she will, with her instinctive
feeling for suffering femininity, "put him
back", as the saying is. I don't attach any
particular importance to these generalizations of
mine. They may be right, they may be wrong; I am
only an ageing American with very little knowledge
of life. You may take my generalizations or leave
them. But I am pretty certain that I am right in
the case of Nancy Rufford--that she had loved
Edward Ashburnham very deeply and tenderly.

It is nothing to the point that she let him
have it good and strong as soon as she discovered
that he had been unfaithful to Leonora and that
his public services had cost more than Leonora
thought they ought to have cost. Nancy would be
bound to let him have it good and strong then.
She would owe that to feminine public opinion; she
would be driven to it by the instinct for
self-preservation, since she might well imagine
that if Edward had been unfaithful to Leonora, to
Mrs Basil and to the memories of the other two, he
might be unfaithful to herself. And, no doubt,
she had her share of the sex instinct that makes
women be intolerably cruel to the beloved person.
Anyhow, I don't know whether, at this point, Nancy
Rufford loved Edward Ashburnham. I don't know
whether she even loved him when, on getting, at
Aden, the news of his suicide she went mad.
Because that may just as well have been for the
sake of Leonora as for the sake of Edward. Or it
may have been for the sake of both of them. I
don't know. I know nothing. I am very tired.

Leonora held passionately the doctrine that the
girl didn't love Edward. She wanted desperately
to believe that. It was a doctrine as necessary
to her existence as a belief in the personal
immortality of the soul. She said that it was
impossible that Nancy could have loved Edward
after she had given the girl her view of Edward's
career and character. Edward, on the other hand,
believed maunderingly that some essential
attractiveness in himself must have made the girl
continue to go on loving him--to go on loving him,
as it were, in underneath her official aspect of
hatred. He thought she only pretended to hate him
in order to save her face and he thought that her
quite atrocious telegram from Brindisi was only
another attempt to do that--to prove that she had
feelings creditable to a member of the feminine
commonweal. I don't know. I leave it to you.

There is another point that worries me a good
deal in the aspects of this sad affair. Leonora
says that, in desiring that the girl should go
five thousand miles away and yet continue to love
him, Edward was a monster of selfishness. He was
desiring the ruin of a young life. Edward on the
other hand put it to me that, supposing that the
girl's love was a necessity to his existence, and,
if he did nothing by word or by action to keep
Nancy's love alive, he couldn't be called selfish.
Leonora replied that showed he had an abominably
selfish nature even though his actions might be
perfectly correct. I can't make out which of them
was right. I leave it to you.

it is, at any rate, certain that Edward's
actions were perfectly--were monstrously, were
cruelly--correct. He sat still and let Leonora
take away his character, and let Leonora damn him
to deepest hell, without stirring a finger. I
daresay he was a fool; I don't see what object
there was in letting the girl think worse of him
than was necessary. Still there it is. And there
it is also that all those three presented to the
world the spectacle of being the best of good
people. I assure you that during my stay for that
fortnight in that fine old house, I never so much
as noticed a single thing that could have affected
that good opinion. And even when I look back,
knowing the circumstances, I can't remember a
single thing any of them said that could have
betrayed them. I can't remember, right up to the
dinner, when Leonora read out that telegram--not
the tremor of an eyelash, not the shaking of a
hand. It was just a pleasant country house-party.

And Leonora kept it up jolly well, for even
longer than that--she kept it up as far as I was
concerned until eight days after Edward's funeral.
Immediately after that particular dinner--the
dinner at which I received the announcement that
Nancy was going to leave for India on the
following day--I asked Leonora to let me have a
word with her. She took me into her little
sitting-room and I then said--I spare you the
record of my emotions--that she was aware that I
wished to marry Nancy; that she had seemed to
favour my suit and that it appeared to be rather a
waste of money upon tickets and rather a waste of
time upon travel to let the girl go to India if
Leonora thought that there was any chance of her
marrying me.

And Leonora, I assure you, was the absolutely
perfect British matron. She said that she quite
favoured my suit; that she could not desire for
the girl a better husband; but that she considered
that the girl ought to see a little more of life
before taking such an important step. Yes,
Leonora used the words "taking such an
important step". She was perfect. Actually,
I think she would have liked the girl to marry me
enough but my programme included the buying of the
Kershaw's house about a mile away upon the
Fordingbridge road, and settling down there with
the girl. That didn't at all suit Leonora. She
didn't want to have the girl within a mile and a
half of Edward for the rest of their lives.
Still, I think she might have managed to let me
know, in some periphrasis or other, that I might
have the girl if I would take her to Philadelphia
or Timbuctoo. I loved Nancy very much--and
Leonora knew it.

However, I left it at that. I left it with the
understanding that Nancy was going away to India
on probation. It seemed to me a perfectly
reasonable arrangement and I am a reasonable sort
of man. I simply said that I should follow Nancy
out to India after six months' time or so. Or,
perhaps, after a year. Well, you see, I did
follow Nancy out to India after a year. . . .

I must confess to having felt a little angry
with Leonora for not having warned me earlier that
the girl would be going. I took it as one of the
queer, not very straight methods that Roman
Catholics seem to adopt in dealing with matters of
this world. I took it that Leonora had been
afraid I should propose to the girl or, at any
rate, have made considerably greater advances to
her than I did, if I had known earlier that she
was going away so soon. Perhaps Leonora was
right; perhaps Roman Catholics, with their queer,
shifty ways, are always right. They are dealing
with the queer, shifty thing that is human nature.
For it is quite possible that, if I had known
Nancy was going away so soon, I should have tried
making love to her. And that would have produced
another complication. It may have been just as
well.

It is queer the fantastic things that quite
good people will do in order to keep up their
appearance of calm pococurantism. For Edward
Ashburnham and his wife called me half the world
over in order to sit on the back seat of a
dog-cart whilst Edward drove the girl to the
railway station from which she was to take her
departure to India. They wanted, I suppose, to
have a witness of the calmness of that function.
The girl's luggage had been already packed and
sent off before. Her berth on the steamer had
been taken. They had timed it all so exactly that
it went like clockwork. They had known the date
upon which Colonel Rufford would get Edward's
letter and they had known almost exactly the hour
at which they would receive his telegram asking
his daughter to come to him. It had all been
quite beautifully and quite mercilessly arranged,
by Edward himself. They gave Colonel Rufford, as
a reason for telegraphing, the fact that Mrs
Colonel Somebody or other would be travelling by
that ship and that she would serve as an efficient
chaperon for the girl. It was a most amazing
business, and I think that it would have been
better in the eyes of God if they had all
attempted to gouge out each other's eyes with
carving knives. But they were "good
people".

After my interview with Leonora I went
desultorily into Edward's gun-room. I didn't know
where the girl was and I thought I mind find her
there. I suppose I had a vague idea of proposing
to her in spite of Leonora. So, I presume, I
don't come of quite such good people as the
Ashburnhams. Edward was lounging in his chair
smoking a cigar and he said nothing for quite five
minutes. The candles glowed in the green shades;
the reflections were green in the glasses of the
book-cases that held guns and fishing-rods. Over
the mantelpiece was the brownish picture of the
white horse. Those were the quietest moments that
I have ever known. Then, suddenly, Edward looked
me straight in the eyes and said:

"Look here, old man, I wish you would
drive with Nancy and me to the station
tomorrow."

I said that of course I would drive with him
and Nancy to the station on the morrow. He lay
there for a long time, looking along the line of
his knees at the fluttering fire, and then
suddenly, in a perfectly calm voice, and without
lifting his eyes, he said:

"I am so desperately in love with Nancy
Rufford that I am dying of it."

Poor devil--he hadn't meant to speak of it.
But I guess he just had to speak to somebody and I
appeared to be like a woman or a solicitor. He
talked all night.

Well, he carried out the programme to the last
breath.

It was a very clear winter morning, with a good
deal of frost in it. The sun was quite bright,
the winding road between the heather and the
bracken was very hard. I sat on the back-seat of
the dog-cart; Nancy was beside Edward. They
talked about the way the cob went; Edward pointed
out with the whip a cluster of deer upon a coombe
three-quarters of a mile away. We passed the
hounds in the level bit of road beside the high
trees going into Fordingbridge and Edward pulled
up the dog-cart so that Nancy might say good-bye
to the huntsman and cap him a last sovereign. She
had ridden with those hounds ever since she had
been thirteen.

The train was five minutes late and they
imagined that that was because it was market-day
at Swindon or wherever the train came from. That
was the sort of thing they talked about. The
train came in; Edward found her a first-class
carriage with an elderly woman in it. The girl
entered the carriage, Edward closed the door and
then she put out her hand to shake mine. There
was upon those people's faces no expression of any
kind whatever. The signal for the train's
departure was a very bright red; that is about as
passionate a statement as I can get into that
scene. She was not looking her best; she had on a
cap of brown fur that did not very well match her
hair. She said:

"So long," to Edward.

Edward answered: "So long."

He swung round on his heel and, large,
slouching, and walking with a heavy deliberate
pace, he went out of the station. I followed him
and got up beside him in the high dog-cart. It
was the most horrible performance I have ever
seen.

And, after that, a holy peace, like the peace
of God which passes all understanding, descended
upon Branshaw Teleragh. Leonora went about her
daily duties with a sort of triumphant smile--a
very faint smile, but quite triumphant. I guess
she had so long since given up any idea of getting
her man back that it was enough for her to have
got the girl out of the house and well cured of
her infatuation. Once, in the hall, when Leonora
was going out, Edward said, beneath his
breath--but I just caught the words:

"Thou hast
conquered, O pale Galilean."

It was like his sentimentality to quote
Swinburne.

But he was perfectly quiet and he had given up
drinking. The only thing that he ever said to me
after that drive to the station was:

"It's very odd. I think I ought to tell
you, Dowell, that I haven't any feelings at all
about the girl now it's all over. Don't you worry
about me. I'm all right." A long time
afterwards he said: "I guess it was only a
flash in the pan." He began to look after the
estates again; he took all that trouble over
getting off the gardener's daughter who had
murdered her baby. He shook hands smilingly with
every farmer in the market-place. He addressed
two political meetings; he hunted twice. Leonora
made him a frightful scene about spending the two
hundred pounds on getting the gardener's daughter
acquitted. Everything went on as if the girl had
never existed. It was very still weather.

Well, that is the end of the story. And, when
I come to look at it I see that it is a happy
ending with wedding bells and all. The
villains--for obviously Edward and the girl were
villains--have been punished by suicide and
madness. The heroine--the perfectly normal,
virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine--has
become the happy wife of a perfectly normal,
virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She will
shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal,
virtuous slightly deceitful son or daughter. A
happy ending, that is what it works out at.

I cannot conceal from myself the fact that I
now dislike Leonora. Without doubt I am jealous
of Rodney Bayham. But I don't know whether it is
merely a jealousy arising from the fact that I
desired myself to possess Leonora or whether it is
because to her were sacrificed the only two
persons that I have ever really loved--Edward
Ashburnham and Nancy Rufford. In order to set her
up in a modern mansion, replete with every
convenience and dominated by a quite respectable
and eminently economical master of the house, it
was necessary that Edward and Nancy Rufford should
become, for me at least, no more than tragic
shades.

I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining
amidst darkness, upon cold rocks, like one of the
ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or wherever it
was.

And as for Nancy . . . Well, yesterday at
lunch she said suddenly:

"Shuttlecocks!"

And she repeated the word
"shuttlecocks" three times. I know what
was passing in her mind, if she can be said to
have a mind, for Leonora has told me that, once,
the poor girl said she felt like a shuttlecock
being tossed backwards and forwards between the
violent personalities of Edward and his wife.
Leonora, she said, was always trying to deliver
her over to Edward, and Edward tacitly and
silently forced her back again. And the odd thing
was that Edward himself considered that those two
women used him like a shuttlecock. Or, rather, he
said that they sent him backwards and forwards
like a blooming parcel that someone didn't want to
pay the postage on. And Leonora also imagined
that Edward and Nancy picked her up and threw her
down as suited their purely vagrant moods. So
there you have the pretty picture. Mind, I am not
preaching anything contrary to accepted morality.
I am not advocating free love in this or any other
case. Society must go on, I suppose, and society
can only exist if the normal, if the virtuous, and
the slightly deceitful flourish, and if the
passionate, the headstrong, and the too-truthful
are condemned to suicide and to madness. But I
guess that I myself, in my fainter way, come into
the category of the passionate, of the headstrong,
and the too-truthful. For I can't conceal from
myself the fact that I loved Edward
Ashburnham--and that I love him because he was
just myself. If I had had the courage and
virility and possibly also the physique of Edward
Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what
he did. He seems to me like a large elder brother
who took me out on several excursions and did many
dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing
the orchards, from a distance. And, you see, I am
just as much of a sentimentalist as he was. . .
.

Yes, society must go on; it must breed, like
rabbits. That is what we are here for. But then,
I don't like society--much. I am that absurd
figure, an American millionaire, who has bought
one of the ancient haunts of English peace. I sit
here, in Edward's gun-room, all day and all day in
a house that is absolutely quiet. No one visits
me, for I visit no one. No one is interested in
me, for I have no interests. In twenty minutes or
so I shall walk down to the village, beneath my
own oaks, alongside my own clumps of gorse, to get
the American mail. My tenants, the village boys
and the tradesmen will touch their hats to me. So
life peters out. I shall return to dine and Nancy
will sit opposite me with the old nurse standing
behind her. Enigmatic, silent, utterly
well-behaved as far as her knife and fork go,
Nancy will stare in front of her with the blue
eyes that have over them strained, stretched
brows. Once, or perhaps twice, during the meal
her knife and fork will be suspended in mid-air as
if she were trying to think of something that she
had forgotten. Then she will say that she
believes in an Omnipotent Deity or she will utter
the one word "shuttle-cocks", perhaps.
It is very extraordinary to see the perfect flush
of health on her cheeks, to see the lustre of her
coiled black hair, the poise of the head upon the
neck, the grace of the white hands--and to think
that it all means nothing--that it is a picture
without a meaning. Yes, it is queer.

But, at any rate, there is always Leonora to
cheer you up; I don't want to sadden you. Her
husband is quite an economical person of so normal
a figure that he can get quite a large proportion
of his clothes ready-made. That is the great
desideratum of life, and that is the end of my
story. The child is to be brought up as a
Romanist.

It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten
to say how Edward met his death. You remember
that peace had descended upon the house; that
Leonora was quietly triumphant and that Edward
said his love for the girl had been merely a
passing phase. Well, one afternoon we were in the
stables together, looking at a new kind of
flooring that Edward was trying in a loose-box.
Edward was talking with a good deal of animation
about the necessity of getting the numbers of the
Hampshire territorials up to the proper standard.
He was quite sober, quite quiet, his skin was
clear-coloured; his hair was golden and perfectly
brushed; the level brick-dust red of his
complexion went clean up to the rims of his
eyelids; his eyes were porcelain blue and they
regarded me frankly and directly. His face was
perfectly expressionless; his voice was deep and
rough. He stood well back upon his legs and said:
.

"We ought to get them up to two thousand
three hundred and fifty." A stable-boy
brought him a telegram and went away. He opened
it negligently, regarded it without emotion, and,
in complete silence, handed it to me. On the
pinkish paper in a sprawled handwriting I read:
"Safe Brindisi. Having rattling good time.
Nancy."

Well, Edward was the English gentleman; but he
was also, to the last, a sentimentalist, whose
mind was compounded of indifferent poems and
novels. He just looked up to the roof of the
stable, as if he were looking to Heaven, and
whispered something that I did not catch.

Then he put two fingers into the waistcoat
pocket of his grey, frieze suit; they came out
with a little neat pen-knife--quite a small
pen-knife. He said to me:

"You might just take that wire to
Leonora." And he looked at me with a direct,
challenging, brow-beating glare. I guess he could
see in my eyes that I didn't intend to hinder him.
Why should I hinder him?

I didn't think he was wanted in the world, let
his confounded tenants, his rifle-associations,
his drunkards, reclaimed and unreclaimed, get on
as they liked. Not all the hundreds and hundreds
of them deserved that that poor devil should go on
suffering for their sakes.

When he saw that I did not intend to interfere
with him his eyes became soft and almost
affectionate. He remarked:

"So long, old man, I must have a bit of a
rest, you know."

I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say,
"God bless you", for I also am a
sentimentalist. But I thought that perhaps that
would not be quite English good form, so I trotted
off with the telegram to Leonora. She was quite
pleased with it.